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Windows 7 on a Dell and on an iMac boot incompletely once in about 7, 8 times -- it will show "Starting Windows", and supposedly, the 4 color dots -- blue, red, yellow, green -- should come out and flying in loops to form the Windows logo.

But these 4 dots didn't show up and the boot up process just halt there. How can this be fixed? Could it be that the network card or the router / DHCP server didn't respond to the computer, and the computer just wait and wait (no time out is implemented to wait for at most 1 or 2 minutes and just show a warning and reboot in 30 seconds or something). Is this a known issue and can it be fixed?

(An AT&T u-verse router is used, but I supposed no matter how the router behaves, Windows should not be affected by it and stop booting up)

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It's not network related for sure, that would not make the boot process hang while trying to resolve and get an IP from a router. – Bruno Pereira Jul 28 '12 at 19:38

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If you have your Windows 7 disk, there is start-up repair available if you boot from it. It has been pretty good in my experience. The fact that it's intermittent complicates things.

I would normally ask if you have you changed any system settings, like from legacy IDE support to AHCI? That's the most common cause for BSODs everytime that I see, although not just hangs every once in a while.

I would guess an intermittent hardware (memory? disk?) issue.

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a clean Win 7 install on the iMac also has that issue... so I doubt it is a non-clean or hardware issue... – 動靜能量 Jul 28 '12 at 19:37
Did you install the SAME copy of Windows (i.e. same DVD) on the PC and the iMac? If so, that points to a corrupt copy of Windows. – Randolph West Jul 29 '12 at 6:04
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Maybe you installed it from the corrupted CD, try different one (if you have any backup of it). Try as well running it in Recovery mode (F8 or hold Ctrl during the start up) and check the system logs or uninstall software which you recently installed. Eventually you can repair the installation using Windows 7 disc or Windows 8 Trial (it has some improved boot fixing methods).

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it is an official Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit edition... so it is the original, and any possible fix should be in the Windows Update list... – 動靜能量 Jul 29 '12 at 0:15
It never contains all the possible fixes, because it always works differently on different hardwares. To check if you have some hardware problem, try removing your ethernet interface (or any other external devices which you have) for diagnostics purposes. – kenorb Jul 29 '12 at 0:34
Secondly Windows from 3.1 they're using blocking network sockets, so every packet which is sent (especially in booting process), it's just wait for the response (blocking everything). If this is the case, you can't do anything, until they'll fix it in Windows 8. You could find some option, which allows to use multiple CPU threads during the booting process. – kenorb Jul 29 '12 at 0:38

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