Just bought a new laptop from ebay as a backup to my existing one. I cant really afford to lose my environemnt and the current one makes funny noises (seems liek the fan is working a bit hard with this summer temperature).. Anyway, something I nothiced after installing everything on it is the difference in performances between the old one and the new one, with the same specs (sony vaio, centrino 1.7Ghs, 1GB ram, etc.). The new one is about twice as fast as the old one and uses half its RAM… And this doesnt seem to be the hardware. The first one was completly reinstalled last year and and it seems like after a while, Windows XP begins to be really slow.. I wonder why, as I have scanned everything for virus, defragmented the hard drive, etc. So the next step is to switch to the new one and reinstall completely the new one… one of my colleague told me it was the same thing with his laptop as well. Windows takes too long to boot up now.. Windows world 
August 10, 2006 at 10:49 am
Perhaps you have a lot of services that are launched at the startup, or a lot of programs in the startup folder… or worst, you have an antivirus software.
My solution is to have a minimum of softwares on my PC (and it is always fast to start up) and I am testing new software in a VMWare windows xp. Try it and you will like it