Booting up takes forever

[NotSoSimple]

Im working on this old ladies computer, and its decent (3.0 HT, 512mb RAM, 160GB HD). I cant reformat because she has tons of data and programs she said she lost the disks too.

It takes forever to boot up (10 minutes?). Its running XP Home. Ran ScanDisk, nothing. Went into Command Prompt and ran a CHKDSK and it found some errors buts said it fixed them.

It boots up better (5 minutes?) but still is extremely slow. Im running Burn In Test at full load, has been for 7 hours now, and it wont fail. Whats the deal?

 

[engiNURD]

did you get rid of all the spyware, if any? did you stop unneeded services from starting up startup? did you stop any unneeded programs from starting up at startup? (Run: msconfig)

 

[NotSoSimple]

Already ran MSCONFIG...Hmm i didnt think of spyware because she was running at 27 processes...Run it anyway? Her McAfee is all screwed up. It needs to be reinstalled/uninstalled.

 

[Dan_D]

I encountered this exact problem the other day with a Dell. 19 processes and the machine was unusably slow.

What I did was clear the CMOS and move the memory to another previously unpopluated DIMM slot.

Don't know why the hell any of that made a difference, but it worked fine after that.

 

[Dangman]

also scan for adware as well.

One time my bro's PC was slowing down like hell but there were only 24 running processers. A spyware and adware scan quickly solved that problem.