Solved Dell POST takes 10-20 Minutes

Here's a new one:

My Dell Inspiron 530 (purchased 2 years ago) has an apparent hardware issue. The Dell Post takes somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes (bar stops at about 50%). On a related note, once the OS starts booting, it does take a little longer than usual to load. From my understanding, the computer doesn't even LOOK at the hard drive or OS until the Post is over... so there's got to be something else.

Here's what I've done so far:
- I upgraded the BIOS to the latest version
- Booted to the Utility Partition and checked hardware there (some Hard Drive read/write errors came up, but I think that's a different issue)
- Checked memory... no problems there.

Some of my system specs:
4 GB RAM
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU 2.67 GHz
System Type: 64-bit

Anyone have some ideas as to where to look?

Welcome
Care to tell us about the post beeps?

Try in safe mode, lets see what happens. Is it still slower than expected?

My guess would be corrupted bios needs to be flashed (only by someone with expertise in the area)
Faulty processor or ram

Redacted:

I'll leave this post for the record.

As it turns out, I remember why all the Dell Support personnel ask you to unplug all peripherals from the computer. On a whim, I checked the Device Manager and found a USB device issue. I found it to be a small external Hard Drive. I unplugged it, restarted, and Post took about 10 seconds (vs 10 minutes).

I hope this can help some other poor fool in the future.

I was just about to suggest unplugging everything! We bought a new monitor once, and it came with a webcam. As soon as we plugged the webcam in, it stalled the BIOS. Unplugged it, and it fixed it. Still need to find some drivers which work properly though. Hmmm.