You did not say what you call slow. From a fresh load (still bare)with what you are running, I would say it may take around 1 minute to be completly booted and ready. Once you install antivirus, firewall, and other programs, you may be around 1.5 to 2.5 minutes. As others have mentioned, running a hard drive test, also a memory test to be sure its not failing under load. Somewhere around the time frame of your computer, they had a bad batch of capacitors, this caused a lot of hard to find problems, if you have a store bought computer(like dell, hp, etc) Do a google with something like, dell sx280 bad capacitors, (of course, put in your model). I ran into this issue several times from different mfg. If you know what to look for, you may see the top of some of the capacitors buldging up, if this is the case, new motherboard time! Also check your ribbion cables to the hard drives, they should be 80 conductor, not the older 40. Another item to check, if you have the my computer icon on the desktop, right click, select properties, click hardware tab, click device manager, scroll to IDE click on the plus to expand, then right click on primary, select properties, click Advanced Settings and see what the current Transfer mode is, it should be be a DMA mode, not PIO Only. If it says PIO Only, this can make everything slow as tar. To change this, go to the Driver tab, click uninstall and reboot. After it boots up, it may ask you to reboot again, if so, do it. After it is up, go back and check the mode again, it should be something like Ultra DMA Mode 5. if its still in PIO only, you may have something like your optical drive causing a problem. Unplug the ribbion cable and power to cd/dvd drive, reboot and check mode again. Hope this helps.