My computer takes ages to boot up

[Ichi]

Recently my computer has been waiting for ages when it gets to the 'loading your settings' screen. It does eventually get to the desktop, but only after about a minute.

With my old Dell, I used to have this problem, except it did the same thing when it had got past the welcome screen. I found it was a service called 'Workstation', but since the computer which I am hacing problems with is on a network, I can't disable this service. Correct me if I'm wrong.

But this has only happened the past few days, didn't happen at all before that.

Thanks for any help.

[Zwendel]

Check your harddisk. I had a similar problem at work. Turned out that my harddrive was mounted using those plastic quick remove thingy's.
After I fixed it with screws, boot time was reduced by a factor 2.

[Ichi]

Sorry, no can do. It's a laptop.

[Rich]

You might try removing any programs which start up by default. It definitely sounds like something is hanging the machine, the only question is figuring out what. The other option might be to try booting into safe mode and see if the safe thing happens. BTW, is this XP or 2000?

[Ichi]

I started up in safe mode and it was fine.

I tried a defrag, and it seems to have worked. I have tonnes of startup programs, I guess it just got confused looking for them all on my messy harddrive :P .

Thanks anyway for your help guys.