What is a "normal" boot time for Windows 2003 Small Business Edition?

Depends on what the server needs to do.  If it has 512 RAM and is set for automatic updates and has updates to install it can take this long.  Does it take a long time shutting down or booting up?

oh and are there other services running on it (mailserver, etc.)?

The machine is a Quad Core Xenon with 4GB of RAM and RAID 1 drives.  It takes about 20 minutes to boot.  Shutting down seemed to take about 10-15 minutes but I did not time it.  It is used primarily for for Exchange Server and DNS.  There are about 12 Vista machines in its domain.

Have you checked your event logs... and is DNS properly configured?  Please post an IPCONFIG /all from it.

I don't see anything that looks relevant in the log files.  Here is the IPCONFIG /all output:

Windows IP Configuration

   Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : IMMANUEL-SERVER
   Primary Dns Suffix  . . . . . . . : immanuel.lan
   Node Type . . . . . . . . . . . . : Unknown
   IP Routing Enabled. . . . . . . . : Yes
   WINS Proxy Enabled. . . . . . . . : Yes
   DNS Suffix Search List. . . . . . : immanuel.lan

Ethernet adapter Server Local Area Connection:

   Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . :
   Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Broadcom BCM5708C NetXtreme II GigE (NDIS
 VBD Client)
   DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : No
   IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.2
   Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
   Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.1
   DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.2
   Primary WINS Server . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.2

Thanks!

SBS server takes forever to boot since it loads Sharepoint, Exchange, etc... 20 minutes seems a bit extreme, ~10 minutes is normal for all my SBS clients. Funny thing is that if you don't really need all the extra SBS stuff, there is a way to "break' in SBS install and stop it at a point where you just have the base OS without the SBS stuff; works out to be an inexpensive way to get a 2003 server up and running. I've also noticed that the WSUS service will significantly affect an SBS box and will eventually consume so much resources you will end up rebooting the box weekly.  May want to consider wiping the box, installing the base os and then just installing exchange from the sbs cds.

Dave

When you get a chance, stop all of the exchange services and then when they are all stopped, time how long it takes for the server to shutdown.  I theory is that exchange is doing some work before closing down.

Adol.

Sorry for the delay.  It takes about 15 minutes to shut down after stopping the Exchange services.  Seems very excessive.

how much memory does the server have?  It's not paging a lot is it?

It has 4GB of RAM.  By what measure would you like the paging information?  Thx

have you tried a defrag on the server?

I'm at a loss from here on.  The server will be saving information of some sort when its closing down but i would not know what.  I'd give it a general cleanup but i would not worry about it.  You don't need to shut it down very often so...

That's a weird thing too.  With 600GB of RAID1, I ran a defrag and it ran for 12 hours and was only 20% completed.  It is only about 50% full, so that doesn't make sense.  I'm wondering if the hard drives have some kind of problem that I am missing and what to do about it.  The defrag should only take a few hours at most.  If the drives are messed up, that would explain the slow boot time, but I am at a loss for what to do next.  Thanks!

Sounds good.  Thank your for your consistent help.

Very clear and helpful comments.  Thank you for your time investment.