Hi, Im new to this forum. Must admit,its been useful so far. I have a dell inspiration, with windows 98 and I have recently installed norton antivirus and firewall 2005. Before installing my computer used to take sometime to load up,and now it ttake more than 5-7 mins, also,once everything is loaded the boot(hardrive) light keeps on flashing,indicating its trying to load more things. Im slightly worried as i have my dissertation to do in the next few months. Any ideas or help would be greatfully apriciated. Thank You Nikki

what anti-spyware programs do you use???? if your answer is none this maybe part of your problem... try these: Spybot Search & Destroy Spy Sweeper Spyware Doctor

also Norton maybe a little heavy on your resources seek lighter aps and not a bad idea to segregate your protection

It's probably doing way too much checking. I don't use Norton so I can't give you specific advice. But check the options and try and limit it to checking email and online traffic. IMO, checking everything during a boot up is not necessary.

If you get to the stage when you are certain there is no nasty on the machine then this might help: All the programs in the system tray next to clock start, then run permanently in the background. Often they have disables if you click around inside the icons. Sometimes you can disable programs and use a shortcut to the .exe file instead (so that they only start when you want them to). Typing sfc in the Run box and selecting Startup tab will also give you a list of starting/running tasks. It is safe to "temporarily" untick any of these except ScanRegistry. This website will help show you what the entries are about: STARTUP ITEMS DerekW

How much RAM do you have?

There have been some interesting discussions about the amount of resources used by Norton products. My personal experience is the laptop I am currently using (cold winter morning here, no need to get out of bed) came with windowsXP and a trial of Norton AV. I thought it was the combo of a Celeron and XP tha caused long boot and shutdown times. After the three month trial of Norton AV ended, I removed it and replaced it with a shiny new copy of Vet AV. My startup and shutdown times seem to have halved! While Norton AV is a known resource hog, the problems can be furter compounded when it has to compete for the resources. Make sure you aren't running rarely used services all of the time. Derek has provided a link for this. And yes, a healthy collection of spyware/adware will bring the fastest computer down to a crawl.