Dell 1150 Inspiron

I know, its a Dell. I have just purchased me a cheap refurbed Dell laptop. One thing I have noticed is that once the desktop is up it's about another minute or more before anyhting will start. You can click on whatever you want and nothing will happen but as soon as it is ready everything you clicked on will come up. Kind of funny but anoying. Running it on a wireless connection and that seems to be the last thing that pops up. It's a 2.6 Cel but it should be faster then this it seems. Its my first laptop so maybe this is just normal for a laptop. Running XP Home with SP 2 on it.

How much memory? How many processes are running?

It has 256mb memory and I'll have to check the processes and get back to you on that. I went ahead and reinstalled the OS but I seem to have no drive disk for it. It does have several disks but none with drivers for the hardware. Only a buch of junk software I was trying to get rid of. I will check the Del site.

It happens to me too, its the network connection, if my routers all busy with the 3 other pc's, it sometimes takes a bit and xp holds off to completely start. Happens only rarely though. Try with no active network connection.

After a complete reinstall and leaving out all the crap that Dell puts on it starts up right nice now. Only deal is I'm missing the little battery indicator icon in the taskbar that shows you how much battery is left which is kind of a handy little icon. How can I get it back?

Go to CP-->PowerOptions-->Advanced, check the appropriate box.