Really slow boot up

["Pigeon" <jah.pigeon@ukonline.co.uk>]

May I take a few minutes of someone's time to ask for a couple of hints?

I have installed the Debian distro (a couple of years ago) and it boots
horrendously slowly.

Everything runs smoothly until round about the time it fscks the root. Then
it sits and does nothing for ages (hard drive light OFF). Finally it gets
going again and everything works fine; it just took ages to get there.
Since (a) I switch the machine off when I'm not using it and (b) it is a
triple-boot Linux/Win98/DOS machine, I can't leave it running to get round
this. It means that I tend not to use Linux if I can use Win98 instead
(HORROR!!!)
I don't think the problem is actually anything to do with fscking the root,
cos the HD light is off; it just happens round about that time. What I
_think_ is up, is that the machine is trying to locate external network
stuff and not finding any (because there isn't any). (I don't use Linux for
internetting because I connect via a mobile phone and there are no Linux
drivers for it.)
Unfortunately I know more or less zilch about Linux networking apart from
that even a standalone machine uses some network services internally so you
can't just get rid of everything network-related.

SO: Please could someone give me some hints as to how to configure the
network services on a standalone Linux machine? OR: has anyone else had
their standalone Debian instalation boot slow, and managed to make it boot
fast?

And is there a way (I'm sure there is) of recording both start and end times
for all the boot processes, to give me a bit more clue as to what's stalling
it?

I would be most grateful if anyone could help.

The machine in question is a Celeron 600 with 384Mb RAM and a 20Gb ATA66
hard drive, no network, no SCSI.

My email addr is jah.pigeon@ukonline.co.uk

Thanks
Pigeon