Time to format....

What system spec is your PC Stu? That seems very slow indeed, and the CPU seems very hot. Is it an Athlon XP?

My main XP Pro based PC boots to the desktop and finishes loading everything in under 30 seconds. I make sure I keep the system as clean as possible , not installing junk, and keeping the registry clean with the minimum of items running at startup.

There are a number of things that can slow down booting. The one most people don't realise is the number of icons on the desktop. This can badly slowdown the boot-up time.

The next is having command queuing enabled for the HD. This HD technology doesn't actually give any real world performance gain and will make XP pause for up to 30 seconds during bootup. Disabling command queuing (from the Device manager IDE/ATAPI controllers) will remove this pause in the boot process.

Next is programs loading during startup. Even if there is nothing in the startup folder in the start menu there could still be a lot loading. You need to look in the registry at the actual list of programs being run at startup and delete the entries for any you definitely don't need. Things like the Quicktime or Real Player files are definitely not needed. And any program that can easily be started from the start menu should have a quick launch icon loaded at startup as that is pointless and will just slow things down and eat up memory.

Next is hardware problems. If there are bad sectors on the HD this will slow down the loading of Windows dramatically as the system will continue to try and read a sector from the drive for quite some time before moving on. The other is Ram. If some of the ram is faulty this will again slow the booting process or make the system unstable.

That is only some of the things that can slow it down, but a clean install of XP should definitely boot up in about a minute or less.

Windows 2000 was quite different. That took a lot longer to boot up. I seem to remember my last Windows 2000 system would take about 5 minutes to fully boot to the desktop. And the less said about the speed of Windows 98 the better!
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I just booted Windows 98 and it took about 1 minutes 50 seconds from switch on to the system becoming usable. And that includes the extra few seconds that were required for it to tell me that it has updated the clock due to summer ending. As a result, my clock is now an hour slower than it should be.
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Last time I formatted my PC was more than 3 years ago, but my Windows XP still boots up in less than 26 seconds. So, not having formatted in a while doesn't always have to be the culprit of a machine that's slowed down to a crawl.

The first thing you should do the troubleshoot slow loading times is to press Ctrl-Alt-Del and take a look at the amount of running processes in Task Manager. My bet is that AT LEAST half of what you have running there is NOT necessary for your everyday tasks.

Just for reference, after a fresh bootup, I have a mere 11-12 processes active, all of which are basically the bare essentials (explorer.exe, two instances of svchost.exe, lsass.exe and a few others).
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ITs an AMD 64, 3700. I have a gig of matched OCZ RAM, one 300GB SATA drive and a 80GB SATA drive just for the OS (I brought the 80gb to see if this speed matters up)

All my main drive has is windows, and the files programs install into the windows system dir.

All my games and apps are installed on a different drive. I have removed all bar my mouse software msn, and av/fw from the msconfig. but some files still reaprear. I have also disabled all of the apple services.

I do have 5 mapped network drives though! but even so. when loading two progs up at one the pc will hang.

and just recently it can take 2 boots to get the pc working.

Thus makes me think the CPU is cooked!
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If not cooked certainly toasty. What cooling have you got?

On a different note. What registry cleaners does everyone recommend???
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Going back to the subject of defragging, why does the Windows 2000 defragger not defrag floppy disks? I had to use the Windows 98 one to defrag my floppy disk.
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Defrag floppy disks?

Is that really needed? I've certainly not heard of it being required. Floppy disks are so small you could just format and copy the contents back on again.

And with an HD using NTFS instead of FAT32 you shouldn't need to defrag the HDs that often at all. Once per month at most is all that is needed, and you won't see much of a performance increase compared to FAT32 formatted drives which quickly slow down due to fragmentation.

And Sharingan made a very good point regarding processes. Something to speed up the OS by quite a lot is to optimise the number of processes that start with the system and run in the background, but are not actually being used for anything. Think of it like Libraries loaded into memory on an Amiga taking up room in memory. To sort out what all of the processes you have running are look through the list of processes you have running and google each of them and read about what they do. You will quickly find those that are not needed, and then can concentrate on how to disable them.

Another thing to speed up system performance is disabling unneeded system services. Windows runs things called services. These are again much like Libraries on an Amiga. Each service is dedicated to running a specific part of the OS or a task relating to certain programs you have installed. You can opt to set each service to start automatically during boot up, which will slow the booting process, or you can set them to manually start when needed, or you can disable them completely.

A service everyone can disable without worry is "messenger". Don't worry this isn't the same as M$ Instant Messenger, but is instead the older built in version that isn't needed. And any services installed that need to run when an applcation starts can be changed from automatic to manual, so they only start when the application needs them.
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