Dell Optiplex with 2.8Pentium D....upgrade?

[Colb]

My parents bought an optiplex about 8 months ago. Not sure the model number at the moment, but it has a 2.8 pentium D with 2G of ram. Ever since it got installed, it never seemed to run "fast". When the computer boots up to the user accounts and you click on any of the users, windows kinda bogs down for about 5 seconds before it switches to the desktop.

Now everything runs fine, no problems what so ever. But my 3+ year old A64 seems to boot up WAY faster than this new, and expensive computer. My only explanation to my dad was that it is a "small business" PC(vs an Old Gaming rig), and with the dual core it would probably shine with multiple applications open. But the problem is that he uses this almost entirely as a regular PC........and once
a month he runs a couple of programs for the business.

Is this the performance we should expect from this type of system? Any faster single core processor I could swap in that would perform alot beter than the 2.8 D? What about a C2D?

[flanzig1]

That Dell probably has a lot of Dell crap loading during boot which is slowing thing down. Start up msconfig and see what all is in the starup. There's probably enough stuf in start-up to choke a buffalo.

[Cricket]

Try running the PC De-Crapifier to remove unnecessary programs from the DELL.

Cricket