Ok everything has been good for the past 6 weeks (since I stoped the oc) and I went to boot the computer earlier today after leaving it off for a few hours and it comes up with the quick boot screen.

It has the Compaq logo and has the F1 for BIOS ESC for Boot Menu

and it sits there for quite some time...I tried to press ESC and F1 (different times) and it just sits there and says either entering BIOS... or loading boot menu...

If I leave it for a while then it will sit there and eventually load the computer, no idea how long, I walked away and then came back like 5min later and it was at the windows login screen...

As I said before, I have not done any new OC or changed any settings in the BIOS, I havnt even gone into the BIOS in quite some time...any suggestions?

try resetting the bios by taking out the cmos battery or removing the J1 jumper. and then go change your bios settings so that its not trying to boot or load anything thats not there (ex. floppy, raid), also change your boot priority so it boots off the HD first. that should speed up boot time a little.

ok ill have to try that...
I dont have any raid setup I only have 2 IDE HDD and no floppy drive hooked up, its sitting in my desk drawer, but just sitting there...

THAT could be your problem, some boards will wastelost of time looking for devices even if they arent there, you might want to look around the bios whne you can get in and see if you can disable the unused items.

I have also seen bad hard drives cause this problem.

yea, thats what the SLI-DR Expert did for me, I had to disable the floppy in the BIOS for it to load faster.

Im guessing that Nerm is hitting the problem, because I have not ever had this problem before and have never had the floppy connected, I have no use for it so I never connected it, but brought it to college with me just incase there was something that would need it...

I just had to register and reply to this thread because I am having the exact problem. My computer is a Presario SR1950NX and it just hangs in the beginning when that Compaq logo appears. It doesn't take any key stroke and just sits there for a while before eventually loading up the Windows or BIOS. The Windows also starts with a bit of pause but once it's loaded there is no problem. This started to happen after the computer stopped in the middle of a DVD movie.

Ever since that freeze, the boot up problem persisted. The Windows showed me a "THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER" error after that incident and it was appeared to be related to the videocard, the integrated GeForce 6150. I've tried to boot with the HDD off, tried with just one RAM stick, and flashed the BIOS. I even bought a new powersupply but the boot up problem remained and I'm fairly sure the motherboard is physically damaged somewhere, but as people know, I cannot replace the motherboard since it's out of warranty and if I replace it with an off-the-shelf motherboard, I'll have to buy a new copy of Windows XP thanks to Microsoft's wonderful license policy.

I put a videocard on the PCI-E slot and turned off the intergrated video. Now the computer boots up without trouble. I wonder what happened to the integrated video chipset. i.e. is it fried, etc?

Well if the onboard video fried, you wouldnt get to be able to see the Compaq screen so that wouldnt be what your problem was...I figured out that my problem is one of my HDDs is crapping out on me, thank god it was just my 40GB that i use for extra space...

i had the onboard video fried and then the onboard usb burnt out on me...but it was a crappy old mobo, but was my first one...poor thing

Indeed, I'm sure it wasn't completely fried as it was working fine in most situations (surfing the web, etc) but I was able to duplicate the trouble by running a DVD movie with all hardware acceleration on, and the Windows would give me the report on Device Driver of the videocard, and I've tried various different driver versions from nVidia too. Could the integrated video part be "partially" broken? hmmm. In any case with the new separate video card things seem fine so far. I'm still rather p!ssed that I cannot simply replace the motherboard with a similar model from a third party thanks to the nice Windows XP OEM license of Microsoft, grr.

do you have any USB drives plugged in or Ipods, my bro had extremely slow boot times looked over every thing the spotted his ipod plugged in the usb pulled it out a wham booted straight up

The only things that are usb that are pluged in are my printer, keyboard, mouse, and my wireless network adapter...

It wouldn't hurt to run some anti-virus software to check your computer. Try Spy Bot, Ad Aware, and Spyware Doctor then restart your computer. Anything different?

i have systematic installed and running all the time (dang school rules) and I have nothing being caught...it runs a full system check every day at 3:00AM