Startup time mystery

Hello, and thank you for stopping by!

I recently decided to do a bit of optimization on my older windows pc setup (following a good guide from this site, of course). Although I was successful for the most part, one thing continues to befuddle me: the start up time.

The problem is as follows: the computer starts to load normally, but reaches a stall point at around the welcome screen, where it spends over a minute with no HDD activity whatsoever. Now it's not the most urgent problem in the world, but I'd like to know the root cause of this and if there's anything I can do about it.

As an aside note, I have 2.75 gb of ram, all three of them pc3200, but from different companies.

Thank you in advance!

I can sort of tell that there's no HDD activity because the HD activity led stays dark for quite a while, and then it seems to come back to life and the desktop screen appears. Right now from power button to when I can do anything is close to 4 minutes at times....Also I disabled almost all the programs via msconfig, 3 user programs start with me, doesn't seem to speed things up.

You can delay load them, which then helps "mesh" the work needed

or you can download WinPatrol(it's free) and put the programs in the Delayed Start tab

Well...my recommendation is get a good disk defragmentor and make it defragment your entire hard drive during boot-up, that way it will defrag all your core OS files, drivers, and all that stuff so when you boot up, your hard drive will load everything faster into your ram and therefore resulting in a faster boot-up time.
-Hope that helps