MadMick

Hehe, okies, sorry dude

Hehe, it *does* play solitare pretty quick . The other 4 systems are all PIII 600 with 512 PC133 ram and various size HDD's from 10G to to 60G, one has a 64M Leadtech Winfast Titanium GTS 2 card and the others have M64 TNT2 cards

Just a quick thanx to your suggestions guys, Bootvis done the trick for me, I'm now booting and ready to rock in about 30 secs, with the amount of hardware I got on this thing that's about as good as it will get I think . P4 2.4G 450w PSU Gigabyte GA-8IRX M/B 1G DDR 2700 Ram 256M ATI Radeon 9600 Pro Video 80 G Seagate 7200 HDD 60 G Seagate 7200 HDD 120 G WD 7200 HDD 250M Zip Drive 52x Liteon CD 52x24x52 Liteon CDRW Front mounted 6 in one flash card reader with 3 active USB2 ports and 3 active Firewire ports 8USB2 ports in total 5 Firewire ports in total 3 Front mounted HDD cooling fans 1 internal cooling fan 2 internal extration fans Here is a pic of the front Add to that the fact that I have 4 other PC's running 24/7 via an SMC Barricade 8 port router and then into a cable modem, I think its now running ok

I would have to agree with Wicked on this, you get what you pay for and the cheaper noname brands cause more hassle then they are worth.

Thanx mate Hehe, I see by your sig that you have spent some time in the Aussie bush

No worries mate, I run my own board and have a fair idea of what/what not to do

Thanx for your input guys, I have already done most of what was suggested, I think XtremeMaC hit the nail on the head with his "too much hardware" comment . I have recently added another HDD, a Zip drive and a couple of other doodads . Thanx again for the suggestions, looks like a clean install coming up

Thanx mate, but I have basically stripped most things out of the start up already, the stuff running now is the stuff that should be running and was running fine before it decided to be a s***head

Yeah I know it will slow down after adding software, that's not unique to XP though, and I haven't added anything new to cause the slowdown, it just started booting slow one day ?

G'day Not new, but only just found the forum again after nearly 12 months . Hi to all the newbies and past members

Gidday My XP Pro installation has in the past two weeks started taking ages to boot up, it goes through the post/bios/login normally, but then seems to sit and think for 20-30 seconds before loading any programs, this can take anywhere from 60 secs to 3 minutes to finish??. Also, a lot of the programs that are running and should be in the system tray are not showing, they *are* running, but no icons show in the system tray. The system is a: P4 2.4G GA-8IRX M/B 1G ddr 2700 ram 256MB radeon 9600 pro video yadda yadda yadda Its running SPI with all the security patches, NAV 2004 with latest defs, full scan finds nothing, latest ZoneAlarm Pro, latest Ad-aware, latest Spyware blaster and latest SpyBot, all find nothing that shouldn't be there. With 48 processes running, the CPU is at 99% idle most of the time. Any ideas greatly appreciated

In Aus it costs 1.06cents an hour for a PC with monitor, that's $AU 1.79 a week, so I wouldn't worry too much about one PC, I have 4 running 24/7 and don't notice it

Yes it has a built in firewall .Make sure the printer icon in Control Panel/Printers and Faxes, looks like this with the hand under it Shared Printer Check out the guide I have here, it may give you some ideas , its really meant for Optus Cable, but should work with most ISP's/setups. Networking

One of many My Desktop PS, how do you make the little pics clickable ??

I assume you have shared the printer ?. Have you got simple file sharing enabled on your XP machine ? Windows Explorer/Tools/Folder Options/View/ then tick Simple file sharing. Are you running any firewall software ?