>Ed,
>
>Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately the software runs on portable computers not attached to a network.
>

There are still some things that you can do that will improve the overall system performance. The least cost mechanism is to defrag the hard disk early and often. Disk fragmentation dramatically slows the rpocess of loading files at startup. Most program loading operations rely heavily on sequential I/O, and defragmentation pays its biggest dividends there.

Adding memory to the system may help the load operation, by allowing the disk controller to do more read-ahead during sequential file I/O. It won't hurt your application certainly, unless chipset-specific boundaries get crossed as a result of increased system RAM.

You may be able to shift the division of real memory resources on the system as well by changing the role of the computer in the Performance tab of the System Control Panel application. This one is a freebie if it helps.

You may be able to force the file into cache at the expense of time at startup. One trick that occasionally works is to copy the file to NUL: during the AUTOEXEC.BAT for the system; the file is read into memory that way, but no physical write will occur. It may result in prefetch of part of the file into cache, but there's no simple way to ensure that it will be retained, and it will always cause a delay in the system startup. Whether the perceived performance of the system by the end-user is improved is hard to estimate without trying, but it's easy enough to try.

Other than that, most laptops have relatively slow drives with small on-disk buffers; a newer/faster drive could help as well, but is likely to be expensive.