Thanks for all the support and advice but I only just noticed that my partner had included BTs Internet security pack with the Broadband package. I think that this has been causing some conflictions with windows security, which was also running making the machine process everything very slowly. I turned off windows security (Bt's advice) and it is now loading pages much faster.
The BT engineer, who I thought was calling today (bank holiday) is in fact visiting tomorrow, so I will check the computer settings with him.
Once again, many thanks everyone for the advice
