Hi all, I'm still trying to sort out why my system takes soooo long to boot(about 3 minutes) and why Games such as HL2, FS2004 + Fcry will no longer play with max settings at a reasonable frame rate. When XP is booting there seems to be sooo much more HD activity and when XP loads and plays it's little jingle, the sound stutters for a second. I have tried everything I can think of (including a format c: and OS reinstall) to test all of my componants. I have all of the latest drivers for everything. I have SP2 installed. The reason I suspect my HD is that on 2 occations now, out of the blue it has forced a chkdsk on boot-up but never actually found any problems. I have run various disk scanning software but none have found anything strange. The drive in question by the way is my 120g sata which is about 4 months old. I have a 40gig IDE in there as well and my next move would be to totaly disconect the sata and install XP on the IDE and see if it makes any difference but that's quite a big job so I'd prefer to avoid this if I could. I checked what is executing as and when XP boots and nothing is abnormal there. I have run every bit of spyware software I can think of. Please please tell me this can't be my graphics card. I only bought that about 3 months ago. Of course it's under warranty and the shop is quite local but it wouldn't inspire confidence would it. Thank you for all your help on previous subjects. GaryM Chaintech 9PJL Appogee 800FSB P4 2.8 HT Sparkle Platinum 6800GT 256MB 4*256 KINGSTONE PC3200 dual 40 gig IDE 120 Gig sata DC10+ Video card

Sounds to me like a spyware and/or applications at startup problem. I have 5 hard drives and I have never come across this problem with my pc, although older computers which did not have the updates from Microsoft.com did in fact take longer to start up. The freezing took place once the desktop was shown. My advice to you is to just re-install, if you cannot find any spyware or viruses, also look for boot sector clustors and/or viruses. P4 3.0 Ghz 2 Gigs Crucial PC4000 DDR Evega Geforce 6800 Ultra 5 x 200 Gig Western Digital W/8 mb cache