Thanks for all the help. It's hard to fix a computer without seeing it.

The computer has worked well for the last 24 hours but was bad for the preceding 24 hours so I had time to try different things when it was bad.
Here is what it was doing - maybe this well give someone an idea:
Turn computer on and it shows the "Compaq Splash Screen" with the option to enter "Setup".  Normally this is shown for only a few seconds but now will stay for a period that varies between two minutes and three minutes.
After this it will usually, not always but usually, load Windows or a bootable disk if one is in the drive.
If I hit F10 to enter setup it has a similar long delay before going into setup but then (again usually) seems to work well.

I ran chkdsk on my first partition (active & NTFS) from Windows and scandisk on the rest of the HD (FAT32) from DOS. Scandisk and Norton Disk Doctor don't  see my NTFS partition from DOS and won't check it from within Windows. Using a program to display NTFS partitions from DOS doesn't help. I may not have the software to do it or just simply don't know how to run scandisk on my NTFS partition.

One suggestion was a computer shop. That is looking more like the answer everyday but an intermittent problem is difficult as it may work well in the shop.

John Brooks
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