After turning my laptop on, when starting up XP,it gets to the welcome screen and pauses on there for a while before windows comes up. It's pausing on the welcome screen a lot longer than when I first bought it. It's only a few months old.

Why does it slow down?, and how can I get it to it's old glory?.

A few things to check before someone brainy gets here :D

Have you installed something that's made this happen? AV etc..

Check the event viewer for errors relating to services on boot

Check your start/run menu, have you got anything in there?

Have you connected to a network recently, or done something to the network properties?

To see what starts, Click Start\Run

Type MSCONFIG.exe and hit enter

You will see a list of all progs that start, and can untick ones that you don't want to start, or to see if they are causing the problem.

BE CAREFUL YOU DO NOT UNTICK ONES THAT WINDOWS NEEDS TO START...

have a look in startup in the programs menu. it's probably becuase your machine is starting programs up to run in the background, anti-virus software is bad for this, but microsoft office is another culprit.

My personal preference is to delete anything that I find in the startup menu - If i want it, im totally prepared to start it myself.

Do you install lots of stuff from Demo cd's off magazines?

cheers for the help people.

I have connected to a network, and done a lot of messing with network settings etc (lan and proxy+)

I'll give it a go:)

jameswrx,

In my experience, once you mess about with networks, every time after that when you boot up; the PC always waits ages as it checks for the network that was connected before...then continues as normal.

If you want things booting quickly, right click on Network Neighbourhood, on your desktop, then go into TCP/IP settings e.t.c. and remove the network card from the list. Your PC should boot quickly again but you won't have any network :D

[Edited by Tony_W - 11/07/2003 13:50:10]