Startup and shutdown problems....freezing...etc

I'm clean virus wise, that's what I thought might be causing the problem at first. The trouble first started when my computer stopped wanting to boot up by itself. Now it needs a windows XP CD to start up everytime, and it takes forever. I added a second monitor at one time and after I did that it started being slow on shutdown. Having me end process after process. When I removed the second monitor it still did it. If I start up my computer in the morning and not work on it until later, when I come back to it it's very slow and I have to restart. Programs like to freeze, Sony Vegas, Word…..and always when I'm working too. I sometimes have a lot of external drives running. I don't know where to start. Help!

Hi, just some general observations to begin:

1 You seem to have your boot drive set to F:
This is unusual as the boot drive is normally C: on the majority of machines in use in for personal and private purposes….Can you share with us why you have F: as your boot drive?

2 You mention that you have a lot of External drives running…this is also fairly unusual so can you share with us why you have a lot of external drives running?

3 Before you do anything else with your machine I need to check with you that your back up/archive copy of all important stuff on your machine is correct and up to date, ………I.E:check that your back up/copyarchive of all your important stuff is 100% up to date accurate and reproducible and kept safe on removable media….even if your back up/copy/archive is only a day or two out of date take the opportunity now to update it.

4 Make sure that you do not forget anything that is important to you….drivers, Windows and Applications product keys and serial
numbers, any downloaded application installation files, documents, data files, emails, work files, address books,
spreadsheets,favourites, photos, music, videos…..your PHd thesis…..or whatever is important to you and what would present a
difficulty for you if your hard drive was to fail, taking everthing on your machine with it.
Also make sure you can quickly locate your installation discs…..so you are prepared if the worst comes to the worst
However its important to get all your important stuff safe before you do anything else.

5 If you can't boot into normal mode or even safe mode (to check your back up) then pull out the hard drive and slave it to a
working computer and complete your backup/archive/copy from there.

6 As an alternative, you could put the hard drive in an external USB caddy and pull off the data required from most modern
machines or even just use an IDE/SATA>USB cable kit, available for a few pounds or dollars from your friendly electrical store,
or eBay.

7 Please be sure to take all necessary personal safety precautions when working with your machines and at the same time
observe full ESD (antistatic) procedures. If you are not absolutely certain of these ,then it would be wise to entrust the work to a
local competent computer technician as although its good to save money and also learn how to fix things, this should not be at
the expense of you or your family's safety, or at the risk of damage either to your machine or your data or all three!

8 Once you are happy that your data and important files and settings on your computer are safely copied, the next step is to disconnect from your machine, any thing that is not necessary for it to run……do this with the machine and peripherals all switched off. That is to say disconnect any USB external drives, flash drives, printers, scanners extra VDU's, cameras etc etc. If you can just have the main power supply a mouse and keyboard and one monitor connected…all the rest to be unplugged, it will be best., make sure that there are no floppy discs in your floppy drive or zipdrives, cd's in the tray, network connections, routers, modems etc plugged in.

9 Make sure that you boot priority in the BIOS is set to boot from the hard drive 0 as the first boot device, optical drive CD/DVD as second, and floppy (if fitted as third), you should not enable booting from either a network or USB device

10 Now start your machine and see how you go.

11 Copy down any error messages you receive and post them back here in your next reply (you can freeze the screen by hitting the Pause key if the error message disappears too quickly to read, and unfreeze it again by hitting the space bar.)

12 Tell us how your machine responds and we will then send you the next set of instructions.

13 Please keep a log of all the steps you have done as you do them, taking screen dumps as necessary and the use of a cheap digital camera can be useful for screen shots dialog boxes etc……the idea is to create a complete audit trail so that in the event of difficulty you can easily undo what you have done.

14 If you have any difficulties with any of this please post back here explaining the particular difficulty and we will amplify the procedures as required.

15 Please be aware that it is possible that the "cure" for your machine could involve a fair amount of work on your part.
Regards
paws

Hi, thanks for replying and I'm sorry tha it took me awhile to get back you you. Answer to question #1, when I built this computer I also installed an older drive from my old PC that was set to C: and I just never bothered to change it. The reason I have so many external drives is that I do video editing and producing which requires alot of space and backups for captured and imported video files. I'm pretty sure I have everything backed up but I'll find some time in the next day or so to do so and check my BIOS settings. I used to think it was my motherboard that was making it acting funny but now I think it's just windows. Would backing everything up an re-installing windows be the trick?