Edd wrote:
>I have a XP home computer that was always slow on the boot.. but came up, 
>I changed out the motherboard a 1bit supposed to be for gaming, anyway, 
>got it all swapped over and it won't boot at all.. starts to but stops at 
>the MUP.sys when you get the option to start with prompt.? So I booted 
>with the CD and went to restore options and did a chkdsk /r that takes 
>like over an hour to do.. and it gets to like 65% done then goes back to 
>50% done... copied another mup.sys over as well just for CYA... any other 
>idea please?>>


Poor old Mup.sys gets the blame, but it's not at fault.

At the stage in the boot sequence immediately after Mup.sys has loaded, XP 
starts to load other drivers which are not generic to XP. So when boot 
hangs at that point, it's actually telling you that everything up to and 
including Mup.sys (which is one of the system drivers) has loaded 
successfully, but that the next stage has ground to a halt. Therefore 
replacing Mup.sys won't help.

There can be many reasons for this failure, but it's often a driver that's 
at fault, either missing, corrupted, badly written, or incorrect version.

That's also likely to be the reason why your computer has always been slow 
to boot.

I would therefore suspect some piece of hardware (probably a printer or 
soundcard) which has a driver either out of date or inappropriate for your 
system---maybe conflicting with a setting in your new motherboard.

Try physically removing all the hardware you can (printers, scanners, 
soundcards, TV and network cards, etc) so that you are reduced to a 
barebones system. Then go into Device Manager and uninstall all their 
drivers. Uninstalling the drivers should remove them from the boot sequence 
so that XP can then continue to boot---hopefully!

That may or may not fix the problem, but it's the first step I'd take. You 
might need to reinstate your old mobo in order to carry out these diagnostics.

It could also be due to a faulty memory slot in the mobo---try changing 
memory slots. A corrupted registry is another possibility.

Here's a useful and clear explanation of the problem and some possible fixes:
http://www.aitechsolutions.net/mupdotsysXPhang.html

If you google Mup.sys you'll find many other possible fixes---you should 
find some that fit your scenario. It's not an uncommon problem, but can be 
difficult to pinpoint.

You could try downloading the free Microsoft utility Bootvis which will 
show you an analysis of your boot sequence if you can at least get the 
system up and running. It will help identify what is causing the boot delay.

Slow bootup times are a good indicator of computer health, and should 
always be investigated if unduly bad. It doesn't take much to tip the 
system into failure.

My own personal benchmark times for bootup, for what it's worth, are that a 
good average computer should boot from power on to desktop first appearing 
in around 30-35 seconds. Anything up to say 90 seconds is acceptable, over 
that and you should start to investigate.

Once the desktop appears, then your startup programs will start to load, 
and these may well take just as long again-depending entirely on what you 
have running at startup. Most of us have far too much, which is the 
commonest cause of instability and poor performance.

These can be controlled by any good freeware startup manager, or by running 
Msconfig.

Don Penlington



 From the Beach at Surfers Paradise in sunny Queensland.
Computer tutorials, local scenery,  and other things at my website:
http://users.tpg.com.au/deepend/index1.html

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