Oh god, I never want to see another windows boot screen again. I’ve been trying to fix some strange problems with the winbox (which didn’t get a hardware upgrade except for video and sound card, but that’s another long story). Basically these consist of it giving me a lovely BSOD a few seconds into it’s boot sequence. I finally narrowed it down to the NIC. Take it out, boots fine, put it in, BSODs with a strange IRQ message, or just a “windows has detected a problem and has shut down”. Someone somewhere suggested it might be ram, so I ran through the 4 DIMMs with no luck. Swapped around NICs, no luck… I think I eventually put it way down at the bottom of the slots and it booted! Then I slowly put hardware back in. First ram, then swapped the video card back (had a GeForce2 MX/200 and a 400 that I was using), then the sound card, then swapped the CDROM that was plugged in (that I can boot off of) for the one in the case (which can’t, but I can’t be bothered to pull it out and replace it), then finally put the case upright (and also put in the SCSI card for the scanner).
In this time I rebooted Windows XP, many, many times. In this time I learned that a Celeron 533, with a second being a count of “a thousand one” takes the following times from the selection of “Windows XP” from the boot menu:
- 6 seconds to display the windows xp logo with the little left-right bar
- 18 seconds for the keyboard LEDs to flash
- 36 seconds to be booted to the user selection/login screen
Do not question me on these times! I know them off by heart now.
Oh well, updates are back installed, time to reboot some more…