It could be a number of things. What speed is your internet connection? The PCs at my school use a T1 line, which is much faster than a reasonably priced home connection. It may be the hard drive. Do you have a lot of programs installed? The drives at many schools are wiped clean when rebooted, so that may help performance. If it's really bothering you, and there is no other fix, I know there are some settings in the registry that effect the delay in opening new windows. Check around the net for registry hacks. My guess is that you're running windows XP, and the school is probably not; I assume that an old celeron could not run XP very well. The XP OS has many new asthetic improvements that can effect performance. I know what you mean though. I recently backed up my files and reinstalled windows, and I noticed a huge difference in performance, for the better.