boot up
 

I am having problems with my Acer aspire 3960 laptop booting up slowly for approximately 5 minutes before I have the chance to log onto Kubuntu 8.4 and I was wondering how do I fix this?

I dont know if this will work for kubuntu, but on fedora, there is a spash screen that hides the boot up sequence. If you press escape (in fedora) you can remove the splash screen and watch the start up sequence. Often times you can see where it's at when it start to get hung up on a particular service and investigate from there.

You need to bypass the boot splash screen.
At the Grub boot menu, edit the default entry and remove any reference to splash or if none is present try adding nosplash (sorry it has been awhile since I ran Ubuntu).
Other things to try is booting into single user mode or text console mode to see if same problem occurs!