[sah]

I use windows xp operating system and mcafee antivirus. The screen as show in the attachment appears at startup and stays approximately 30 seconds. Untill it vanishes the system responds very slowly as if the system hanged. This is too much disgusting and time consuming.

[Maurice]

Welcome to the world of Anti-Virus checking.

ALL AV packages slow PCs down. During the startup the AV package will be busy scanning the drive and hopefully looking for updated signatures to download etc.

The more software that gets loaded on to a PC then the more that takes place during the loading of Windows.

Things to do:
1. tidy up the hard-drive by getting rid of as much un-needed stuff as possible. Open up the properties for the drive and click the disk cleanup button.
2. uninstall any software that you really do not use anymore.
3. at the 'run' command enter - msconfig this will enable you to see all of the things that start up when Windows boots. There maybe some services that you can swithch to 'disabled' or 'manual' you MUST be careful that you don't disable key services. Next you can see what programs load vis the 'startup' folder and registry. There may be items that can be removed.

Just be careful that you don't disbale key items. You'll be surprised at how much unnecessary rubish can be getting loaded at start up.

You can also look into adding more RAM to the system. Ideally XP likes 1 or 2 Gigabytes. Anything less than 1Gbyte will impair performance.