TSGL: Extremely slow booting

[Heidi Schröder]

Hi everybody,



once again I am trying to solve a problem for my friend - she does know 
absolutely nothing about the technical side of a computer. Her husband 
obviously is not much better but is willing to follow how to work out things 
when it is written down clearly.



Now by chance I came to know that their computer does take roughly 10 
minutes to boot up after being completely switched off and about 5 minutes 
even to wake up from Standby mode (seems that has been this way always or 
for a long time already at least). It is Windows XP for sure, home edition 
is my guess and I hope they are doing all updates as well. I know for sure 
they are using Internet Explorer (probably still 6, as my friend did not 
mention any problems with a new view of Internet Explorer) and they are 
using some Norton Pack with firewall and antivirus software. Lately the 
computer became very slow in general so I have told them to do a general 
clean-up which obviously did work as by now my friend can write her mails 
without the terrible delay she had then. But I have really no idea what 
programme to advise them for to check the start-up folder which was my first 
guess for the long delay. I mean, all such programmes I came to know so far, 
usually are not really good for you when you do not know quite a bit about 
the programmes you have installed and all that.



As I can't imagine there can be that much in the start-up folder to slow the 
computer down that badly - are there any other problems that can slow the 
computer down at booting that much?



I know it is the usual difficult bit and I ask for a lot of guessing, but 
please do it - I will not get more information from my friend as she does 
not want to get into the computer stuff more than absolutely necessary  and 
her husband will not talk to me, the person who does know all computer 
things better usually.



Have a nice day

Heidi