A few weeks ago my mother’s laptop got infected with the Sasser worm, I patched the OS and removed the offending files, but a few days ago it started taking a huge amount of time to boot. I talking something like 10 minutes on a Pentium 4 2GHz. I tried getting into the system to try everything that I could find online to fix it, but since it was running so slow, it took forever.
So eventually, I said f that, and decided to do complete system recovery. I pulled out my Knoppix boot CD, and backed up all her essential files, and then used the recovery disk that came with the computer.
Fast forward about two and a half hours, and the recovery is only at 13 percent. Is this normal? When I was backing up with Knoppix, everyting went super fast, sometimes even faster than when windows ran well, so I doubt that it is a problem with the hard disk or anything else. I expected it to take some time, but at this rate, it is going to take 20 hours!
I guess that the fact that Linux ran faster off a CD that XP off the hard disk should tell me something about the quality of windows, but this is ridiculous.
20 hours is a bit excessive. I haven’t tried installing/reinstalling XP ever, but the guy at the office ran through reformatting/reloading all of our computers before noon (granted, he got one started and moved to the next). My experience with Windows of various sorts is that it shouldn’t be more than three hours, usually under an hour (of course, figuring out how to get your drivers set up right is much more frustrating).
As to possible reasons why it may be taking so damn long: In my experience, system restores take a lot longer than clean installs, especially if your system restore disk tries to save My Documents and other files and if you’ve changed the hardware inside the computer, sometimes it gets confused.
The good news is that you can walk away and if there’s an error, it will stop the installation process, so it’s not like you’ve got to be there the whole time.
Don’t know that this helps, but maybe the bump will.
Well, it seemed to pick up the pace after it got to about 20 percent, it finished in about 4 hours.
But it still seems to be taking forever to boot windows. What could be causing it to lag so much on a brand new install?