Mine has been taking about a minute just to get to the "login" screen. once windows starts to load about 15 seconds later the screen goes blank for like 30-45 seconds and i dont know if it's loading or just sitting there going slow doing nothing! it's done this since i installed windows. last night though, i went to bed and i was playing a buncha games and had a buncha stuff open then i woke up and just turned my monitor on, clicked shutdown and went back to bed. when i go and turn it on today it didnt stall at that black screen as it usually does. any ideas?? i've had it for about 8-10 months. to avoid this before, i used to use SLEEP mode but my computer like froze while going to SLEEP and it screwed up and I had to take the battery out of the MoBo and now the SLEEP doesnt work anymore so i've been shutting it down. 3.6GHz dual-core 4-gigs of RAM @ 4-4-4-12 800MHz vista ult 2-HDD's in Raid-0 (with windows on both) Thanks!!