For some reason XP is taking an absolute age to start up. It will sit on the windows XP scrolling page for 63 scrolls of the blue bar! Comparing this to various other pc's that normally take 9 scrolls. Even then the screen will switch blank for 15 seconds and then the desktop will take another 30 seconds to load before I can do anything. I've formatted my disk several times - on a clean format with nothing installed it starts up instantly, but as i reinstall my programs Windows will take longer and longer to load. I've also noticed Internet explorer takes quite a while to load up along with other programs (ive checked the processor activity on the task manager when loading, this fluctuates between o% and 15%). Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this. Is it possible for a virus to remain even after a full format? Ive been thinking it might be my hard drive is there any way i can check it without going and buying a new one to find there's nothing wrong with it?

It's a case of needing housekeeping. Start by clearing your drive of rubbish - in My Computer, right click the C: drive, choose properties & then 'Disk cleanup' - get it to clear all options. Then click on Start/Run & type %temp% then delete everything you can in that folder (some temp items will be in use so you cannot get rid of them immediately) In Control Panel/Internet Options clear your cookies and files (disk cleanup should have done this but no harm making sure. Do a disk defragmentation. Then run checks for spyware with Adaware and Spybot. Try the above for a start & see if this improves things. You can obtain diagnostic software from your disk manufacturer's site which will do hardwaer tests on the harddrive. "I know that I'm mad - I've always been mad..."

make sure you have all the drivers correctly installed. to check that open system properties from Control Panel. Click on hardware, click on device manager. Make sure no items are in yellow.

Cheers for your help, I did a disk cleanup, defrag and ran adaware but it found nothing, its a fresh install (couple of days ago) so was hoping there wouldnt be anything. My hardrive is a western digital so i downloaded a disk diagnostics for Windows. This test fails with the error message - Test Result: FAIL Test Error Code: 06-Quick Test on drive 1 did not complete! Status code = 07 (Failed read test element), Failure Checkpoint = 65 (Error Log Test) SMART self-test did not complete on drive 1! Does anyone know what this means? I'm assuming my harddrive is knacked?!

How to Perform a Clean Boot in Windows XP To help troubleshoot error messages or other issues when you cannot determine the cause of the issue, disable common startup programs, settings, and drivers to eliminate possible software conflicts when you start Microsoft Windows XP. This procedure is known as "clean booting." How to perform advanced clean-boot troubleshooting in Windows XP and that one is a heavy duty article. Print the articles for reference. --------------------- Try this also: How to Perform Disk Error Checking in Windows XP http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315265&Product=winxp

1st of all check your C:\windows\Prefetch and empty that. Also you may try Bootvis for faster booting and as a last resort....if these above fail for you. You probably have to write zeros to your HD and then reformat. I had to do that with mine when I thought it was toast and it's worked great ever since.

Do you think running chkdsk or sfc /scannow would help? A good computer takes good care of their computer