boot lag

i'm running a hp pavilion xt963, before when the logo came up at boot up it went pretty quick, recently i've had lag and it hangs for about a minute longer or so then loads windows, am running xp either one depends on what i feel like that month. um, i've lowleveled formated and it still hangs. i was thinking perhaps its been hacked or has something in it at start up but don't know what the H311 i'm looking for as strings or where to begin, so i've so far downloaded a few tutorials and hope to find it in that but if someone has any suggestions where i should start looking or how, it would be much appreciated...
thanks thanks and even more thanks for reading this

I would run disk clean up and defrag the hardrive and then check to see if there are any programs in your startup folder.

DIdi you go to run-? msconfig and click the "Startup" tab, and there u can select what programs/service you want to run on statup....i myself have only the AV loading on startup, loads in like 3 seconds....

thanks for replying

Let's see, i guess i worded that wrong, please bare with me


When i turn my system off, and restart it, I get the HP logo.
Normally, it use to flash for about five seconds, now it hangs for about 2 minutes before it starts to even load the Windows XP version page then onto loading windows.
My problem is, it hangs before it even loads windows, so i thought, at boot up, someones put something in the bios or something before it loads what platform i'm even using.
I've low leveled this system and still it hangs.
Is there any way i can look at what is in the 529 MB of space HP takes so it has what it wants loaded when i turn the system on, like HP has coded the system to accept only certain recovery cds, if all things don't match, the cds are useless.
So, I wanted to know ow to get in there or if someone is a programmer who has dealt with HP products if they could contact me and lend me a few minutes of their time to see if i can get into there and fix what is hanging me up, as it never use to before i figured something else is in there now. I hope this better explains my problem.

HUGE THANKS FOR READING!!!

What are the specs of the machine?

Processor speed, RAM, Hard Drive?

One cause of slowness at boot is bad caps on the motherboard. How old is the system?

Yes CXJ~ has a good point................in particular, how big is the hard drive, and how much space is there left?

This kind of thing can happen when you get a build up of spyware/adware. Remember that your AV will probably not find therse.

Try getting Adaware6 and SpyBot Search & Destroy............update them, then boot into safe mode and run them.

That might help :)

i'm running an hp xt963 1.20 GHz 382 MB ram 85% free space on hd system is 3 yrs old now
hope this finds me some help
how do i check to see if caps are bad on hd
thanks guys ...