rotating driver conflicts

[slck0]

I have a Gateway GT4024 desktop running Windows XP. It works fine once I get it booted up, but for over a year it's had an annoyance that seems to be getting worse (or I'm getting less patient with it). About 25% of the time, a driver won't load at startup.

Usually it's the Display Adapter (ATI Radeon XPress 200 Series). And usually a reboot will fix it.

But sometimes it's the audio driver (Realtek High Definition Audio).

And sometimes it's the Network Adapter.

And sometimes it's even the USB controllers. In all cases, if I reboot enough times it will "fix" itself - but sometimes that's 3 or 4 reboots in a row.

I've tried updating all of those drivers from their respective sites, but it didn't seem to help. I'm now back to the drivers listed on Gateway's site for the machine.

Does anyone have any ideas of what I should look for or try? I'm pretty good with a computer, but I've got to admit that drivers and buses and IRQs have always confused me.

Thanks in advance.

[Doc C]

Have you tried a disk cleanup and defrag? Those seem to help where I work.

[IanS]

Try also the full cleanout provided by ccleaner at ccleaner.com

[slck0]

Thanks for the tips! I'm a big fan of CCleaner, but haven't run it on this computer in a while. I also discovered that the Diskeeper application I thought was keeping me defragmented hasn't been running -- it's going now. Hopefully the combination will improve things.

[rainbore]

It would also be a good idea to do a thorough check for viruses and other malware. It sounds to me like the problem could be a startup task that's running very slowly or generally hogging system resources when your drivers are loading. Try running an anti-malware package that you don't use on a regular basis to cover issues that your regular security programs may not catch. Spybot: Search and Destroy is very popular, and I had good luck recently with Malwarebyte's Anti-Malware. Good luck!