When I was visiting my friend, I noticed her computer boots up really slow, and when the screen redraws, it takes seconds. Thought must be a virus or spyware, and offered to help. It is a Dell DIM4600C, it has a 2.6 Ghz processor, and on-board graphics, but didn't think the video interface was the problem. Hard drive looked fine, but defragged it anyways. It had XP with service pack 3, and removed the non-functioning McAfee anti virus that plagued her with all kinds of annoying popup messages and replaced it with free AVG.
What the heck?
Looking at the hardware profile, and there it was, right in front of me all this time...
The computer only had 256 MB of RAM - it was RAM starved.
Why would Dell sell a computer with XP that will be RAM starved and have such poor performance??
Friday night, after dinner, we stopped in at Staples, and bought two 512 MB DDR SDRAM, for $60 for the pair. Five minutes to replace the memory, most time spent on getting the new memory out of the plastic tombs..
Now the computer boots within the minute, and the screen redraw is near instant.
If you have a XP computer that boots slowly and slow screen redraw, check the system memory.