Dell 640 laptop slow to boot – 2551 days old

[joek]

I have a dell 640 laptop borrowed for my holiday here in Vancouver BC . It has xp pro, Intel 1800 m processor. I am staying with friends who have no broadband connection they have AOL dial up which I downloaded aol 9.00 , and managed to get online . I am new to laptops . OK for a couple of days until today when I turned on to check my mail via my own ISP ntl in uk it took an hour to fully boot up. Desktop appeared as normal but icons only kinda half filled ( no Colour in them ) it took ages to fill out the desktop icons and for the programs in the systray to appear ie,. Norton , Ewido the aol icon to connect the dialup .About an hour later everything is up I connect to aol and am online everything is running fine..I went into safemode ran adaware spybot ewido a couple of cookies was all that showed.I've done this twice. I looked at the transformer mains connection to the machine it works from 90 v to 230 v (uk) and is obviously charging the battery ok .I am not sure I'm in the right forum , I am all out of sorts since travelling .any help please or thoughts

[joek]

I ran defrag cleaned up anti malware andit takes a long time to load other stuff

[Dark Angel]

Check what you have running. Open the task manager and have a look at your applications and processes. you may find something is dragging your cpu out to 100% on a high priority task. Possibly some interaction between AOL and Norton?

[joek]

I did try task manager and when starting up most use of cpu is 4 % so I ruled that out meantime . Could I disable norton as the loading process takes place ?

[TJM4FUN]

check that the laptop has not gone into a powersave mode. Usually if not running on wallplug, it slows the processor down by some amount to maximize battery life. they can have a few steps of that, ie half speed or quarter speed. moat will have a battery icon in the system tray that tells what state the power system is in. anothe spot is in desktop properties, in the screensaver tab, then power schemes. I would verify you ar running at full cpu speed.