Well, honestly I don't feel someone should be stressing about
how long their computer takes to start up!! I honestly don't
get that. I leave mine on 24/7 and only reboot maybe once a
week if I remember to, or if I add new hardware or updates that
require me to reboot.
If your hard drive is ATA66, then it's a bit out-dated. I would
try a fresh install of Windows 2000 or XP (whichever you prefer)
on a good 8MB Cache, 7200RPM hard drive and see if that
pleases you.
No offence intended, but all the rest of the issues could simply be
user error, bad installs, old hardware, improperly maintained
windows install, or as you said, just an old install that should be
refreshed.
A computer is much like a car, and we are talking about performance
computers, so we should think of performance cars. If you took
a great car, say a Porsche for example and loaded it up with
all the best breaks, suspension, engine, and whatever else,
but you never changed the oil, no matter how much quality is
in the equipment, you're not going to perform up to it's optimum.
Also, the amound of software you load and let run on your
machine also effects your system performance. If you let spyware
and even innocous software such as Office, Anti-Virus, Kazaa,
whatever else bog down your machine, it's like taking that
Porsche and loading it with bricks. Sure the machine can handle
the load, but it's not going to be as snappy and fast if you load
it down with crap.
Again, with the Porsche analogy, going back to your hard drive.
You have a Porsche, you have a 400HP dual turbo engine, but
you put cheap gas in it (old hard drive) then it's not going to
perform up to the machines capabilitys, because it's only as
good as it's weakest part.
Sorry if that all sounds geeky, I often refer to computers as
performace cars because it's something almost anyone can
understand (barring *most* women, LOL). When you break the
idea to the simplest concept, people tend to realize and respect
the importance of things that seemed small and unimportant
previously.