richk

Something easy to test is the cable. Have you tried a different one? How long is the run? I assume it is a cat-5 cable, but I have had problems connecting with long runs. (over 40').

I am trying to help a friend fix a "slow boot" problem in XP Home. She has a DSL modem connected to a network adapter. She has a dynamic IP address, where the modem acts as a DHCP server. She needs to run some sort of program to start her internet session. Whenever she boots the machine, there is an endless wait before XP finishes starting. Another piece of information is that if she unplugs her network connector, the machine boots quickly. I believe that at boot time the network driver senses that the network is "up" and tries to get an IP address from the DHCP server and the modem doesn't respond and waits to time out. Is there any way to change the timeout value or something equivalent? I found ways to do this under NT4, but not under XP. I thought about trying to start the network driver as part of some sort of script that also starts the internet connection, but I think that would only delay the startup problem until she tried to establish the internet connection. The DHCP service is not available until after the network needs to be running. Thank you

thanks for the reply. I have not tried the static IP address yet. I was hoping to find some sort of timeout value in the registry. I assume you are talking about an "alternate configuration". I had told her that I could try that the next time I was at her machine. I assumed that I would also need to do something to refresh the IP address from the DHCP server when she connecting, such as a script.

I have the partition magic 5.01 upgrade and as far as I can tell under win2k, all you can do is make rescue disks to boot from. I thought the new fancy version ran in naive mode as it does under NT4. When they talked about a patch, I expected that something would be installed on the hard disk. All I got was 2 crappy diskettes.