Maximum PC

My aunt's computer is an older Athlon XP 1.93 GHz system that has Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 installed on it. Sometime in the past week, AVG 2012 Free Edition began taking around 5.5 hours to perform a full system scan, instead of the less-than-one hour system scan that it usually performs. Does anyone know what's going on here?

Other relevant system specs are:

FIC AU13 motherboard
1.5 GB of DDR 333 memory
120 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 hard drive
Lite-On DVD-R/RW 20X optical drive
ATI Radeon 9600 AGP 8X video card
Corsair 650TX PSU

First thing to look at in old systems like that is the motherboard for popped caps....that was a big problem back then.

Nasty

Nasty, I would have thought that if the motherboard was slow to post, but for the last eight plus years, this thing has booted just as quickly as it did when I first built this system in December of 2003 (I originally built it for my nephew--he was ten years old at the time--but later sold it to my uncle for $75 about four years ago). Could bad capacitors still account for the slow system scan if everything else about the system works well?

Take a peek at the board, if there are popped caps, that is the problem, if not, one diagnostic option is eliminated. Caps are usually part of timing circuits and are important. Start with basics and work up. How about the bios settings, that board is 8 years old, did you change the cmos battery? It may have lost settings to quick boot.

Nasty

Point taken, Nasty. Unfortunately, I won't be able to peek at the board until sometime in the latter half of March. In the meantime, I am going to be checking the capacitors on a Samsung monitor that they will be taking down to my sister's place and which I will be picking up from there in about four weeks.