Boots Faster, But How!?

My mums pc that she uses at work is a HP PC and its coming up on 2/3 years old now. Its got 1Gb DDR400 running dual channel mode, IDE HDD, Pentium 4 3.0Ghz 800mhz FSB (Dont think its HT).

Now her pc boots up very fast indeed, after all the bios stuff it takes about 20-25 seconds to fully load all the stuff on the desktop and be ready to use. She has A LOT of stuff that loads up during startup, usaly about 55-60 Procceses running and still the pc is very fast. Now my new pc has got a Pentium D 805 2x2.66Ghz 533Mhz FSB, 1GbDDR2 667Mhz dual channel mode, and a SATA Hard Drive and i have no were near as much stuff to load up, about 30-40 proccesses running. And my PC takes 45 Seconds just to get to the login screen after its got past the bios stage. and then another 10-20 seconds to load up after logining to load all the stuff.

Ive done online and offline defrag and cleaned out all the crud i dont need/want/use and can get the boot time down. Now this pc should boot just as fast if not faster than my mums work pc. Im not to bothered with it really but im really confused as to why mine takes longer.

Thnakks

Possibly some of the programs get loaded from a server after boot-up? Just a guess.

Yes but no.. all the programs are loaded from the pc but a few of them do connect to a server when there open

Old pc will boot faster. Most new pcs have onboard raid controllers etc which take time to load. My old dual athlon rig has a built in raid controller, once that was disabled the boot time was faster. If youre not using any of the onboard bits, disable them on the board or in the bios.

my computer takes literally almost 10 minutes to boot (the point at which firefox has launched).

Well old PC's do generally load faster, less rubbish, less complicated drivers.. and so on.

Going back onto hard disks , they are, again, a limiting factor, it doesn't matter how quick or what specs your PC has is, it affects boot up time very little (if you get what I mean). Think about it - your graphics card, ram, and all that rubbish arent used to thier maximum during boot up, and neither is CPU usage *most* of the time.

all true... but how do you explain how a pc that has to load a lot more then mine and with a 3 year old IDE drive manages to load 30 seconds faster than my brand new SATA?? thats what i dont get.

Because, the drivers are not as complicated, the software installed probably doesent need as much startup time as your software, and her 3 year old IDE drive is probably just as fast. Way of life, im afraid.

As I said its probably down to the the junk on the motherboard that you have.

But having said that my opteron 175 loads to windows in about 30 seconds but I only have 39 processes

You could try something like Bootvis to analyse your bootup and see where the delays occur.