The slow boot is most likely that you're loading a lot of startup programs
and/or loading a bunch of fonts.  Go to control panel/fonts and see how many are
loading.  I've heard of people loading as many as 2500 fonts, but for most
people it's more like 300-400.  It gets higher when you install a lot of
programs with their own fonts. Also, try control/alt/del to see what you have
loading at startup. If it's more than a couple (don't count systray and
explorer), go to start/run, type in msconfig and click OK or hit enter. Go to
the startup tab and see which boxes are checked.  You can kill most of them, but
not all, by unchecking the box and restarting.  Some load at startup from
Win.ini.  If you go get the free utility startup cop from www.pcmag.com
(navigate to utilities), you can kill them all no matter where they load from.
You can also remove them permanently from the startup box.

As for programs dawdling at the splash screen, try cleaning out your browser
cache and history files, deleting c:\windows\temp files (if you have Win 98 use
"diskcleanup" utility on the accessories menu under system tools).  Then do
start/run and type in scandisk to check your drive(s).  After that run disk
defragmenter under system tools on the accessory menu. If you've done the above,
then I'm sort of at a loss without taking a look at your machine.  Joel



I've been running an Athlon 750 with 128 M Ram for a couple of
> months now. When I boot the machine into Windows 98SE it takes quite a
> while to do. Also, when I start up an application, sometimes the splash
> screen will freeze for sometimes up to a minute and then continue
> loading. I don't know if this may be a hardware problem, but if anyone
> has any suggestions, I would appreciate it.

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