Okay. I don't know anywhere else to turn short of paying thru the nostrils. Here's my situation:

My desktop is an Ibuypower gaming PC I got for my bday. It's no monster but it runs things for me to my satisfaction. it has a quad core q6600 and 4 gigs of ram - 32 bit vista. It has an ASUS P5N-E Sli mobo with 2 XFX 8600 GTS cards I run in both SLI and single card depending on the game. I've disconnected all my toys from it down to a generic keyboard and simple usb corded mouse and the problem persists. The problem? At boot up it can literally take 2 to 4 hours to boot to the desktop. After turning the power on it just hangs at the ASUS splash screen (the one where it tells you to hit delete for setup and tab for post bios message.)  Putting in the vista recovery in the dvd drive doesn't do any good either just does the same thing. if you do hit either key or F8 for that matter it does go to the appropriate screen, but sits there for hours as well before actually going to the set up screen or bios or the boot menu. I've tried changing the cmos battery. Putting in a new hardrive. Installing the latest bios from Asus. Updating AND rolling back the Nvidia drivers. The thing is... when it does finally boot everything works fine. No problems. I'm no PC whiz, but I have been messing with these things since my first PC which was a TI 1000. What ver happen to the days when it was always either the config.sys or autoexec.bat file? Any way I'm guessing that the problem has to be somewhere in the process of turning power on and bios reading the drive kicking off system boot up. I mean doesn't that make sense? I've tried moving everything to an external and reinstalling vista. I've set up bios step by step according to the booklet that came with the pc. I'm not up to speed on the ins and outs of pc techno terms, but does RAID have anything to do with boot up?

One thing I noticed though is that if you turn the monitor off it usually doesn't take as long - sometimes as little as an hour and a half (woo-hoo). Yes I tried a changing monitors but no dice there.

Yes, I know I should just take it to the geeks at Bestbuy, but I'm on a fixed income at the moment and I really need to save the scratch if possible. So do any of you techies have any ideas I could try before having I take the ride down to Bestbuy? I realize I'm just grasping at straws here, but I'm hoping maybe someone has had this happen and it's something simple I just don't know I need to do. Any help or suggestions would be mucho appreciated.

Well,  I unplugged everything USB and hooked up a ps2 keyboard and mouse. That didn't do it, BUT I also have the 1203 BIOS installed from ASUS' web site and it's a beta that's been giving people a lot of problems. So, as soon as it finally boots up again I'll roll that back to the latest non beta bios which is 1103. I'll let you know what happens...

Thanks for answering my post in any case.

keni

I don't recall exactly how many but from memory I believe it's in the area of 52 processes (which is way too many, I know). I've killed as many as I could based on what I know for sure windows doesn't need to run, but some of them are iffy for me. I did use Nick's post on killing processes on this puter which is a gaming lap top and it has helped. I'll have to apply the same tweaks to my desktop as well.

keni

Roger that, Wingo.

Right now there's nothing USB attached anywhere on the puter. I've got it waiting to go into setup, so I'll look for that USB setting you mentioned as well. The last time it was on though I hit the F5 key which was to put everything in BIOS back to default in case I screwed some setting up in the course of my tinkering.

Thanx
Keni

Well, I guess the computer wins.

I've tried everythig I could think of and everything suggested to me. I've replaced a dvd drive, tried 3 different bios versions. Tried detaching all usb items both before and after each new bios version. A home made vista boot disk is hit and miss. Tried changing numerous settings in bios. A clean install of vista doesn't work (it would take a week to install with the number of times the install restarts.) So I'll just have to bring it to best buy someday. For now at least it will still boot up even if it takes hours.

Keni