Faster PC, Slower Boot?

Hello,

I've asked the following question on other site forums without any real answer.

I've build a new system and installed a clean XP Sp3 OS.

For some reason though, my new faster system takes about 3 times longer to get past the initial Windows XP Logo boot screen than my slower XP SP2 system did. I don[t think that this boot cycle should take so long (around 20 seconds as opposed to around 7 on my old slower PC).

Does anyone have any clues?

It really isn't a major thing, but when you go from a single-core P4/160Gb HDD to a 3Ghz Core 2 Duo with SATA II HDD's with approximately 40% faster transfer rate then you wonder why this slower boot time is the case.

This issue was present immediately after I had done a virgin install of XP Sp3. Nothing else was installed, so it cannot be anything application related. I do not tend to tinker with services, so pretty much the default stuff is running. Bear in mind that this delay is during initial boot - i.e when the screen is black with the Windows logo displayed, so I don't htink it has yet conected to any Internet connection. I assume this is the phase when the main kernel, device drivers and services are started.

I notice that my graphics card driver is initialized at about 18 seconds after the black boot screen is displayed becaise its fan slows down. However, I think 18 seconds to reach this point is slow.

The key difference is that my old system was running SP2 - but with all patches installed, so I cannot seethat this should cause such a difference.

Also, I am running my system using 2 HDD's configured in RAID 1 mode under the on-board ICH10R controller, but my old system used the same setup under the older ICH6R without such boot delays, so I am none the wiser