John Rumm used his keyboard to write :
On 04/03/2020 11:51, Harry Bloomfield wrote:
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...

Which OS did it restore to? If 10, then there are number of ways going to
safe mode:

https://www.ccleaner.com/news/blog/h...s-in-safe-mode

It was Win10, but as described below - I have resolved it now, via
accessing safe mode. I'm not sure its a legitimate copy of Win10
though, because it says 'activation required' in the bottom right hand
corner.

Not all that bothered, but it still has a peculiar issue..

If set to hibernate, instead of sleep - it seems to go through the
hibernation process when the power button is pressed, but when coming
out of hibernation the screen remains black. It flashes up a photo,
then black again. It never gets to the login screen. Sleep, shut down
and reboot all work fine.