Getting system up to speed !!

Here goes,

My wife got a computer about 2 years ago specs are as follows :

C2D 6400
P5B 965 chipset
2 x 1 gig of OCZ DDR2 - 667 ram
Seagate 320 7200.10
GPU 7600 GT


This rig is mainly use for web surfing and other office tasks when she's working from home. Thing is, it seems rather slow specifically when booting XP. It easily takes 5-7 minutes from pushing the start button getting to the desk top. I am sure it's not a matter of virus or some such because it was acting the same even though I had reformat and reinstall XP. For an all purpose rig this should be plenty fast but I feel it's not performing on par with the hardware mentioned above. Crap, even my HTPC which is a 780G MB + AMD 5200 is performing quite a bit better when using Vista.

I am open to suggestions as how to improve performances of this rig. It's there any components that should be checked or changed ? I could OC it but for the intended purpose I don't like that option. I agree, it's 2 years old but it's not like it's completely obsolete, I mean this process is still plenty capable and there is something here I don't grasp. I was thinking maybe changing the MB for something more recent like a P-45 MB might help. Might be a RAM issue but it was not performing any better when I tried some DDR2-800 sticks with it.

Anyways, I could use some help/hints/suggestions/advices

^^that tip is very vague, i dont even know where your trying to point to

I am not familiar with what you're suggesting, what exactly it this supposed to do ? speed up the booting process by not trying to detect unused hardware ?