hey all, just built my brother in law a new (budget) box consisting of: celery 1.7 ghz cpu gigabyte GA 8ST667 mobo 256 DDR ram 64 mb ge force 2 v/c 30 gig maxtor hdd he is low on cash and doesn't play games, it is mainly for the internet and young kids. anyway I built it and put on xp pro, sp1 and office xp, and was very happy with how it ran, quicker than my amd xp1600. So I sent it up to him, I am in south east S.Aust. and he is in South Brisbane, QLD. this is the hard bit. Anyway he recieved it and it is apparently very, very slow now?? Anything he tries to open, from the start menu itself to any type of file, he just gets the bloody hour glass for 1 minute or even up to 3 minutes before what he is tring to open opens. I can't make sense of it as it should work or not if something came loose on the trip up. Bloody hard when I'm down here and it was fine. After checking the following it's no different: unselecting items in msconfig startup starting in safe mode no different no conflicts (apparent) in device manager cpu and ram usage low in task manager setting to an earlier restore point he's checkdisking hdd at the mo... it is just really, really slow to boot up, open anything, and shut down. haven't checked for virus cause he hasn't been on the net and hasn't got an XP compatiable anti virus yet..... any help appreciated while I try to figure it out... cheers ppl, Daryl

Has he run defrag recently? Chkdisk and defrag are two different things. -=Bryan=-

no cause he hasn't even used it yet as it is too slow to work with. It's like fast, click fingers, slow. cheers

no cause he ahsn't even used it yet cause it's too slow. It's like it was fast, click fingers, now slow. cheers

Try isolating the system's core components from t it's apps (clean boot)..follow this link to per form this process...also elimnate any apps that are starting automatically. Heres how to clean boot XP...cut and paste this link into a browser and send it to your brother in law http://search.microsoft.com/default.asp?qu=310353&btnSearch=Go&boolean=ALL&nq=NEW&so=RECCNT&ig=01&ig=02&ig=03&ig=04&ig=05&ig=06&ig=07&ig=08&ig=09&ig=10&i=00&i=01&i=02&i=03&i=04&i=05&i=06&i=07&i=08&i=09

Everything is slower in Queensland. Remember you are on Daylight saving time and your Brother-in-Law isn't. (Sorry about that...Couldn't resist) Possible something came a little loose in shipping. Check all cables. Reseat ram and VGA card. Check CD ROM.