Computers - love them or hate them?

I know this blog is primarily about games or games related stuff but I also like tinkering about with computers so I occasionally post bits about them too. My computer, which I have had for about 2 and half years has been pretty well behaved. I do try to keep up with all the safeguards against viruses, spyware and the like. Also I regularly defrag, and clear out the registry of redundant keys and dump old files. But I have had this problem for about, oh, I don’t know must be 4-6 months, whenever I connect to the net and boot up IE it takes like 15, yes 15 minutes to display the first page. After that it’s OK and everything is normal speed. Not life threatening but extremely annoying, especially when I was on dial-up with a limited time contract. Now I am on broadband and I still get the problem. I have tried lots of things to get rid of this annoying problem. Binned off ZoneAlarm, thought that might be causing a problem. Trouble is I can’t remember exactly when it started so it’s difficult to ascertain what software I put on that’s causing the problem. If it is a piece of software.

I have just thought, maybe it’s IE itself, so I installed Firefox, nice browser by the way. Nope, still the same. After my last fruitless tinker session the time lag seems to have come down to 9 minutes. Nearly finished ranting now, lol, but you know what I mean. I really love messing about with my computer and surfing and stuff but now this annoying bug is driving me nuts!! If I manage to eradicate this, I will keep you posted of what it was. I’m sure it will be something stupid and simple, which will make it worse. Gnash! Gnash!