slow boot-up

[D man]

here we go, another boot-up problem. im actually doing this for a friend, and here's the info i have so far. the computer is 4-5 yrs old, and has 96 megs of ram. the computer boots very slowly, taking upto an hour in some cases, and even when it boots, the entire system performs slowly. even the mouse tracking arrow can never keep up with the mouse. based on the info i have provided, i just need some general areas to look at. processor, motherboard, whatever. completely unrelated, (or is it?) is the internet access, which he can't get going, but his computer WILL communicate with another one on the local LAN. so i think the nic card is fine, but i could be wrong. are these problems related? any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks all......

[mjc]

First thing, scandisk, defrag and empty the temp folder, and browser cache.

What OS is he running?

When was the last time a virus scan was run?

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mjc
Links list:Computer Links (http://www.dreamwater.org/tech/mjc/index.htm)

Celts are the men that heaven made mad, For all their battles are merry and their songs are all sad.

[ski]

There may also be a lot of programs loading at startup.
Check this by going to Start/Run, type msconfig, click OK/Startup, uncheck all items except Scan Registry, System Tray, Load Power Profile(2 of these), Antivirus program, and firewall(if there is one), click Ok and restart.

However, it's also possible that the hard drive may be failing, since an hour to boot up is way too long.
My nephew has a 7 year old computer, and the HD was never defragmented or scanned for errors, it had all sorts of programs loading at startup, and the browser's cache was never cleaned out, and it started up in a little over a minute.

[Randy_tx]

The thing to check is how much "FREE" space is left on that drive!! It sounds a LOT like a full hard drive to me!

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XP didn't save Me !