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When I boot my computer up then it is now taking about 8-10 mins to fully boot and is painfully slow.

I have been in the msconfig (start up) and checked all the programs against Bleeding Computer's start up guide and unchecked all those that it recommended to do so and that helped and it's now down to about 6 mins but it's still slow.

It is an old computer and one that we have upstairs as a back up to our main desktop and our laptop but with 2 sons still living at home then I can't get near those.

It's an HP running XP Home Edition.

It takes about 3 mins to load most stuff but then takes another 3 mins to load that poxy Norton Internet Security 2007.

Any advice guys or is it just that the computer is getting old and I have to live with it.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Get rid of Norton as a starting point. It's a horribly slow and invasive little program.

I had your problem a few months ago and it was the prelude to a hard drive faiure, so back it up if there's anything you want to keep on there.

Thanks for replying.

The problem with that is my youngest son went out and bought 3 lots of Norton Internet Security 2007 for all 3 computers that we have and they were only installed at the beginning of Feb so I don't really want to replace them either individually or collectively.

Looks like I'll have to just live with it.

Ouch... try turning all of it off in your startup menu and rebooting to see if it's any faster. Go with the backup idea though just in case. I lost a lot of stuff when my PC died, even though I did manage to back up most of it.

Xp is like that it even has a System Idle Process that is anything but.

You could try an XP Re-Install (obviously back-up first).

If your computer also takes a long time to close down then it is probably on its last legs,

Will suit me - a new hard-drive and an nice clean install of Ubuntu/MythTV

The computer shuts down in about 30 seconds so that's ok.

Thanks for the advice Jaques on reinstall xp but I wouldn't know how to do that probably wouldn't trust myself with that either.

Thanks for the suggestion though and thanks also to the others that took the time to reply which as always is greatly appreciated.

It's actually very easy Benny.........

........that's if you have an official copy of XP instead of a recovery cd which some stores give you with pre-installed operating systems.

If you've an official XP CD (with the product key), and you know how to get into your bios, and set the boot priority then you should be fine.