Computer takes almost 1 hour to boot up

[queenofthecapitalwasteland]

Can anyone provide some tech help? My computer is an acer with windows xp andonce it's on it works fine but for some reason it takes forever to boot up from whenever I turn it on. I have had some support guy look into it but whatever he did, whichseemed to be only a de-frag, hasn't help at all.

Could it be a hardware problem? Can anyone suggest anyything that might help?

Most commonly a computer that takes a long time to boot up is either trying to load up a huge amount of unnecessary stuff when it starts and/or has way too little memory, or has a virus infection. Those aren't the only possibilities but they are the most common.

When it's booting I'm guessing that it's stuck on showing one thing for ages. What's on the screen when it's just sitting there apparently doing nothing useful?

Once it's started up do you have a lot of programs running in the system tray (the bottom-right corner of the screen where the time is shown)?

Do you know how much memory the computer has? If you go to the Control Panel and click on System it should tell you.

Has this been a gradual slowing-down thing or was it that one day it would boot up normally in a few minutes and then the next day it took an hour?

Do you have an up to date anti-virus program on it? Can you get it to do a full scan? Also, try downloading Malwarebytes Anti-Malware from here and getting that to do a full scan too.

All the screen does is stay blank until it suddenly pops up with the log-on screen. It has happened over the last few days and just suddenly happened, not long after getting new anti-virus software. Might try new software.

Did you check to see how much resources the anti-virus thing needed before you installed it?

Anti-virus things not used one of them since 1998 I know absolutely nothing about them, and I'm glade I don't.

Hmmm - when you installed the anti-virus, did you uninstall the previous one? If you have remnants of the last one, they can conflict and block each other....

Don't think the previous anti-virus was deleted, it was a free trial that had run out. Will get rid of all traces and see if that helps.