Data, or anyone with ideas...

Mum and Dad's PC is taking ages to boot. It takes three or four minutes from cold to even start booting, ie there's no power or life for that time.

The date and time were messed up and I thought it might be the battery, but no.

Any thoughts ?

Thanks.

Nothing springs to mind

First thing I would do is disconnect all drives from the mobo, then see if it boots to bios at a more sensible speed.

If it is faster with drives disconnected then then its probably a drive problem.

If its still slow then you are looking at a process of elimination, might want to check power supply first.

Only an SSD and a CD-Rom in there. Think I might swap out the PSU with a spare one I have here.

It is not even reaching the Power On Self Test (POST)?  Please post the current BIOS version of your Mum and Dad's computer.  So we may check if there is an update available for the BIOS of your Mum and Dad's motherboard?   Years ago, I had a something like this happen, and it only got worse and stopped booting all together.  Turned out to be a computer virus.   So, if you can boot, no matter how slow.... Now may be a good time to do a full backup.  

Please don't let this frighten your Mum and Dad.   If you swap out the Power Supply Units, make sure it supports enough watts for whatever is installed in there, I suggest.

Some pretty neat and deep advice there 8pla 

Freddy how is this going ?

I will be swapping the PSU out over the weekend.

I've built quite a few PCs now, I'll get to the bottom of it. Quite familiar with BIOS updates, PSU requirements etc...

Thanks folks

i3 on micro ATX might be calling. 

Good luck 

Well if I can fix the boot problem it should still be okay. They only use it for internet, low demand games and the odd thing. It's still XP too. No need to go mad if it doesn't warrant it.

I did get a quote for a PC from Mesh Computers, for a £257.00 PC with Windows 10 on SSD. Seems pretty good to me.

Any thoughts on Intel Pentium G4560 Kaby Lake, 3.5GHz Turbo Dual Core, 4 Thread Processor ?

That's what it would use. Integrated graphics which would be fine, but they do have a graphics card in there that could always be used again.

Here's the Mesh computer specs...

System Base Price: £ 215.83

CiT 1023 Mesh Stylish Black Micro-ATX Case Front USB 3.0,  headphone jack

400W Desktop Power Supply

Asus Intel H110M-R DDR4 Micro ATX Motherboard USB 3.0

Intel Pentium G4560 Kaby Lake, 3.5GHz Turbo Dual Core, 4 Thread Processor

4GB 2133MHz DDR4 SDRAM Memory - (1x4GB), upgradeable

Integrated Intel® Full HD Graphics, D-Sub, HDMI

Upgrade to 120GB 2.5" SATA III Solid-State Drive from 1TB SATA III 6GB/s 7200rpm 64MB Cache 8ms [upg £ 15.00]

Integrated 7.1 High Definition 8-channel Audio

High Speed Network Port (Supports High-Speed Cable / DSL / Network Connections)

Microsoft Windows 10, 64 bit edition Home edition- Minus[£8.33]

90 Days BullGuard Internet Security

Lifetime Warranty - (Lifetime Labour,1 Year Parts,1 Month Collect & Return)

Free Technical helpline (UK)

Free delivery

So for about two hundred twenty-two quid, 50p your folks hge a new system? Can't argue with that.

Wait a minute here...

Quote from: Freddy on March 24, 2017, 17:21:17 PM
Upgrade to 120GB 2.5" SATA III Solid-State Drive from 1TB SATA III 6GB/s 7200rpm 64MB Cache 8ms [upg £ 15.00]

The way I read this, it seems you're upgrading from a 1TB SATA3... OHHHHHH... it's a HDD! Never mind.
but why only a 120GB SSD? A unit that's twice the size can't be that much more these days, and 120GB is a bit small for today's computing needs, isn't it?

Not for their needs though Dave, that's the thing. I have a spare 1TB HDD that I can bung in there if they want storage. And there's already a spare SSD from the old PC which I can add to it.

Fair enough. But given how bloated Windows 10 is, 120GB may only be large enough to hold the OS. Just a heads up.

I've done a few builds with dual core Pentiums + SSD on microATX, they are good. That one is the newer 4 thread version, It should be even better.

It doesn't matter too much, considering the price and what it's needed for but, It looks like it only has one stick of RAM running in single channel, when using onboard graphics fast RAM is quite important - its used as VRAM, that also means you tend to need a little more RAM as well. 4 GIG is sailing close to the wind in windows 10 with onboard graphics. 

Saying that I wouldn't recommend putting an old graphics card in it either, it's just going to slow the thing down and take power doing it.

Oh and remove that 90 Days BullGuard Internet Security ASAP 

It should be quite a snappy thing in dual channel + SSD         

It seems good to fall back on, but they are no way as demanding as us lot 

20GB for W10 I read. I'll see what disk space they are currently using.

For the games Mum plays they are really undemanding - things like those gems games and discover the secrets. I don't think any of them are 3D.

But I will have to see if the PSU makes a difference first. It would be nice to have them on 10 like me though, so when they ask I don't have to stress my memory trying to remember how to do something on XP 

Bullguard would be swapped to Defender.