Help: Why does XP boot differently each time?
I have asked a tech, but he had no answer so i will put this out to the many minds on this forum.
Why Does XP boot differently each time?
Every day when i look in task manager, the sequence of all the processes not only is different, but the memory left for the user varies by up to 14MB.
I do the same 2 things every day - and well, it makes no sense to me.
My best bet is automated processes do not always do the same thing every time you boot the system. For instance your antivirus maybe didn’t get to check a file cause of a file lock while you used it last, so it checks it during boot up, or maybe windows update, office update, antivirus update, antispyware update, real player, or one of the other hundreds of standardized auto updating programs ran an update and needed to do something different at next boot. It could also be one of those auto updating programs had a delay in accessing the internet and took longer to release the processor to the next control.
That does explain both ram usage and process order.
`Mitch
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Mitch is correct… automated processes such as Windows Auto-update, virus scanners and well, just about anything that loads up and stays resident at boot can vary their memory usage from one boot to the next.
i disconeccted the machine from all outside sources and did the exact same thing ( read my notes on a few things) then i rebooted twice got different results with each boot but without windows update running and the dsl lines disconeccted from the world
JoeJoe,
yes that makes sure that nothing is being updated at startup BUT when you start i am sure your antivirus scans the system memory for know viruses. Depending on which application loads first at startup depends on how long the antivirus is using the memory. Also from time to time Windows Xp runs what is called prefetch. What prefetch does is trys to guess what programs you are going to run and gets them into memory ahead of time. So depending on the last time the automatic cleared prefetch was cleared also will determine what programs are loaded into memory. Now you say they you do the same 2 things every day. I am guessing one is surf the web. Well depending on what brower you use that could be another option. It is pretty well known that Firefox has a memory leak (sadly…I love Firefox) and that could cause a difference in memory usage.