slow boot problem

hello all,

fairly new to the forums (posting wise, i usually just lurk). . .

ive had my area51m for about 5 months now and everything has been wonderful thus far until the last week or so. . .

i had this issue where my laptop would NOT detect the internal NIC. i ended up calling support and to make a long story short he had be remove the battery and unplug the power and then hit the power button to completely discharge the system at which point the NIC worked again. ive heard of similar issues with Dells etc. so that problem was solved.

then, for no apparent reason the machine started to blue screen on shutdown and when i would boot back in and the Windows error report thing would come up i told it to report the error which it said was caused by a bad version of Nero that there was a fix for, so i downloaded the fix and problem solved.

however, for the last couple weeks ive noticed my machine is taking a lot longer to boot up. it gets past the alienware logo screen fairly quicky but then sits at the blank screen with cursor for quite a while before it proceeds to the windows boot / logo screen. if i go into the boot device selection menu after the alienware logo disappears and select "Hard Drive" it proceeds directly to the Windows boot screen quickly like it used to. thus, it almost seems as tho it's hanging until it decides what device to boot from.

anyone else experience anything like this? any suggestions?

thanks all!

-chris

i never changed the order but right now it's cd-rom, hd, nic

there were a couple nero entries actually, so i disabled them.

thanks for the recommendation, ill see if it works next reboot.

ok it worked!

there were 2 things nero was loading at startup and i think one of them was causing the CD-Rom to hang for a while.

thanks again!