Slow boot up and shut down.
 

My nephew has a new machine 1.7 amd cpu so it should be fast enough.
I have just been having a look at it, windows xp was installed.
It seems to take a awfull long time to boot and also to shut down.
Seems to be a load of stuff running at start up, had a look at progs on start up, but because I am not familier with xp, I do not know what is nesessary and what can be switched off, ie I noticed that for some reason Real player is on the startup list, this is not necessary surely.
Anybody got any ideas on how to speed the boot up on this machine,? it seems ok once it is up and running.

Try this site, it has a lot of useful hints on speeding up XP.
http://www.tweakxp.com/tweakxp/performance_tweaks.asp

To speed up shutdown, try the following:

go to Start Menu, Run

type services.msc

in the list of services double click on 'Nvidia driver helper service'
in the 'start up type' drop down box select disabled.

When you shut down, it should be significantly quicker. Worked for me.