Windws xp taking a long time to load....
 

I mean startup after a reboot or coming on after sitting in standby mode. Like 5 minutes sometimes/

Anyone able to offer any suggestions?

It's an HP Pavillion with a 1.4ghz and 504mb ram

Could that be a littel antiquated for todays times?

I do have a bunch of spyware protection which might be a bit too much.

Any help is always appreciated.:silly:

512MB RAM is the minimum XP needs to run smoothly. And in the computer world, "minimum" never, ever meets my expectations or patience level. I'd say the same for your processor. How much anti-virus and spy ware do you have? Try for only ONE anti virus and ONE anti spyware program. Otherwise they all conflict and screw you and your computer up the beeeehind. Plus they all require more memory. The only spyware program you really need is Spybot-SD.

What happens when you go into safemode? Go into safe mode, open up start menu, go to run, and type in "msconfig" without the quotes. There's a tab up top that says "Startup," these are all the programs your computer runs when it's starting windows. Disable them all, boot into normal mode and sort it out from there.

Also a hard drive defragmentation will help a lot.

Ara's advise was just what I was typing up. msconfig is the best.
I've got XP Professional running on a PIII 448 mhz with 128 RAM and it doesn't take nearly that long to start up. Then again, it's a Toshiba Tecra.
I also have it running on a Dell PII with 512 ram for the kids' PC and it takes less than 2 minutes to be fully up and running from a full shut down.
The HPs I've worked with have extraneous start up stuff. Upon reformatting and reinstalling XP from scratch, that seems to clear whatever HP puts on them.

New computers you buy from your average retail store are packed to the brim with a ton of CRAP you don't need. It just overruns the desktop and the bottom right of the task bar. If I bought a new computer I'd be mightily pissed if it takes 5 minutes to load.

You should look into building your own desktop computer. Way more reliable, cheaper, faster, and better in every way that I can think of.

Laptops though are a pain, I think the only laptop I'd want is a black MacBook. Those are built like tanks.

Back up all your data fast. Then buy a new drive and reload the operating system from the CD's that came with your computer. Reload all the extra software you installed and apply maintenance from Windows Update.

Windows is not going to start at all and give you the Blue Screen Of Death. Act now!!!

I'm not kidding, this happened to my laptop and I was lucky.

Had the same problem with my P4 2ghz desktop recently.
One cause was Norton Ghost and NIS.
The other was a load of crap in my startup list. There are utilities around that let's your check and modify your startup list much easier than with MsConfig.
Added a strip of RAM aswell, which improved speed to.

There is a folder named prefetch. Google: winxp tweaks prefetch