John Rumm wrote :
unless its got a disc full of crap.

At that age the drive may well be ailing. It will have been slow even when
new.

I am told it hasn't had much use since new. It was crawling to the
point of logging in, but I have managed to sort that out using a
rebuild from the hidden partition. Unfortunately it didn't do a restore
to factory and left the following rubbish in place and loading.

It loads various things when booting, including Premier Systems, Winzip
Driver and Webdiscover - grinding to almost an halt in the process. It
becomes so slow, it is impossible to use control panel to be able
remove them.

I seem unable to do a safe boot, or maybe I don't know how...