Glacially slow, 10-minute boot times!

[Fred Langa]

LANGALIST Glacially slow, 10-minute boot times! By Fred Langa When a PC bogs down to the point where it takes a full 10 minutes just to fully wake up,
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Microfix, abbodi86

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[mn–]

Eh, 10 minutes isn’t all that bad.

Certain kinds of problems on a server can make it take literally hours to boot up. BTDT, eventually found the faulty piece of hardware and replaced it.

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[100andthirty]

I had a problem with a desktop system that generally booted in about 20 seconds. It was sometimes not booting at all with the Windows 10 circular dots just, er, circling endlessly. It went back to my very helpful vendor who was unable to reproduce the problem but he carried out all the fixes normally used in such a situation and updated everything in the operating system to the latest versions. He commented that “this computer runs very fast”. (2 years old, i5, 16GB RAM and 256GB PCIE SSD, SATA HDD).

I got it home and reconnected and everything was fine. Next day, endless circling again!

Cutting the story short, I unplugged the USB3 external HDD and the issue has never reoccurred!

The moral……always worry about external peripherals.

2 users thanked author for this post.

rexr, SueW

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[anonymous]

I agree with 100andthirty on this. It took several rounds of updates to discover, but I found that the USB 3.0 devices were trying to boot after updates had completed. My USB 3.0 devices are connected via a hub, so if I unplug them during the reboot process (while they are powered off) and wait for all updates to finish, everything seems fine. The easiest way for me is to wait for the reboot power down sequence and unplug the entire hub. Hopefully this will save people a lot of frustration.

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[Still Anonymous]

There may be a variety of things that can cause slow bootup, and condition of attached peripherals is something that’s easily missed (and I’m often likely to forget, myself).

Beyond that, yes, it’s possible that startup activities are affecting, but shouldn’t impose 10 minutes.  It’s not just what’s starting up, but what those startup processes are doing, that may be suddenly activated, such as the Windows indexer, malware scans, backups or other kinds of data synchronization.

Something that the original description doesn’t make mention of is whether the problem happens on every bootup or not, and whether or not the user normally shuts down or hibernates the computer overnight, or leaves it active.  If the computer is not active overnight, then it could be that the lag could be processes that are scheduled to run overnight that are getting caught up when the computer becomes active at the beginning of the day. Also, the original description doesn’t note whether slowness is limited to bootup (before or after Windows login) or if the system is slow in other ways, such as the time it takes to launch applications.

If it’s an “every bootup” issue, then I’m inclined to believe something related to hardware, at least indirectly.  One simple possibility could be a boot drive that’s effectively full (above 80% utilization), and where there isn’t enough working space for Windows to work without the drive having to work *really* hard.  And related, if the computer doesn’t have enough RAM (e.g., <= 4 GB) and where startup programs are using enough RAM where swapping is happening.  If slowness is happening before Windows login, then the problem is unlikely to be user-tunable startup processes (although something happening in system services, or being launched by the system scheduler could be an issue).

Digging a little deeper, there could be hardware problems — motherboard, hard drive controller, etc. (as well as the previously mentioned issues with peripherals).  Even a bad driver could be causing issues.  One other thing that I’ve found that can be a source of slowness is with the hard drive.  If the system is perpetually slow and normal tuning doesn’t make any noticeable difference, I’ve found that running a check of SMART status is useful.  If a drive is throwing SMART errors, it’s in the process of failing, and slowness is frequently a symptom.  Replacing the drive usually clears that problem

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[BobT]

I had an issue with a media drive (SD reader and all that, connects by internal USB), where occasionally the PC would do a really slow beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep at startup and take an AGE to get to the logon screen. Luckily picked that as the first thing to unplug, and has been fine since.
No driver update helped.

I now just plug it in only when I need it. Bit of a fiddle opening my case for that, but then again I barely use it anyway.

• This reply was modified 1 week, 4 days ago by BobT.

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[werner]

My computer boots up fairly quickly, but in exploring this article I found that Task Manager reports “not measured” for essentially all programs! No data on “last bios time” either.
What’s up?

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[b]

Unfortunately, the Startup impact column in Task Manager has been broken in version 20H2 for almost six months and Microsoft have been ignoring reports of the problem. I wish I could report better news or more information, but there we are.

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werner

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[Alex5723]

b wrote:

Unfortunately, the Startup impact column in Task Manager has been broken in version 20H2 for almost six months and Microsoft have been ignoring reports of the problem. I wish I could report better news or more information, but there we are.

Not on my 20H2.

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[dsliesse]

I, too, occasionally suffer from glacial bootups on my 3-year-old laptop.  After waiting 30 seconds or so for the system to let Task Manager open, though, I find it’s almost always because every application under the sun just has to download its update!  BitDefender is the absolute worst at getting out of the way of other work (and it will be history once my current subscription is up), but Windows itself — even with updates on delay — and Acrobat Reader are other major culprits.

Twenty years ago I would have had the patience to experiment and see how well my mission-critical programs work with Linux, but now I just put up with Windows and dabble with Linux on rare occasions.  My wish is that Microsoft would stop trying to be another Apple and reduce Windows to an operating system rather than an operating environment (or at least make a cut-down version so that those of who don’t have to be spoon-fed every bit of the software can set up our systems).

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[Microfix]

Reads like some of the above posts have the bootmenu in the BIOS set to USB device as 1st( primary) before the HDD/SSD. I’ve never encountered slow boots beyond a minute (hardware dependant) on BIOS/MBR when the 1st(primary) device bootmenu is the HDD or SSD.

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[Alex5723]

dsliesse wrote:

(or at least make a cut-down version so that those of who don’t have to be spoon-fed every bit of the software can set up our systems).

Windows 10 LTSC and Workstation are your answer.

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[Ben Myers]

Any time I see a lament about slow boot times or slow computer anything, I have to ask if the hardware is 100% operational.  The major culprit in slow boot times is a hard drive with bad sectors, so look at the SMART data with Speccy or another free utility.

My favored second culprit is a hard drive like the pathetically slow Seagate 5400 RPM 1TB laptop drive I have replaced recently in three computers.

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[Alex5723]

Ben Myers wrote:

slow Seagate 5400 RPM 1TB laptop drive

Not even a 1000RPM HDD should make Windows to boot in 10 minutes.
It is usually a BIOS/UEFI + faulty drivers problems to start with.

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[mn–]

My “favorite” boot time prolonger is still an intermittent short on a disk shelf’s address line.

It’s something that doesn’t happen on low-impact systems like workstations because those don’t have lots of disks, so it’s never a “common” fault… server (with a storage role) only, with the usual uptime demands. Also it might look like it “works now” after it comes up, but with a constant background high risk of data corruption.

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[wavy]

short on a disk shelf’s address line.

mn could you elaborate?

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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[anonymous]

Alex5723 wrote:

Windows 10 LTSC and Workstation are your answer.

Those answers are still far to expensive for very many people, people will budget 309 dollars to facilitate other necessary aspects of life. Thankfully there free tools and advisement to help people cobble together their own cut down version of Windows 10.

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[quiberon]

BIOS time of 0.0 seconds, that can’t be correct surely.

Win 10 pro v2004

ASUS P8P67 motherboard

Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K C @ 3.3GHz

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[LoneWolf]

To me, 10 minutes is a sign of a failing hard disk, or something seriously wrong with the operating system.

Either that, or you have a Quantum Bigfoot drive

(for those with less history knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bigfoot )

The first thing I’d do (if not already done) is back up the system, and then possibly look at running a CHKDSK /R  from bootable recovery media. No system newer than five years old (and no system with an SSD at all) should take ten minutes to boot if it’s a regular desktop.

We are SysAdmins.
We walk in the wiring closets no others will enter.
We stand on the bridge, and no malware may pass.
We engage in tech support, we do not retreat.
We live for the LAN.
We die for the LAN.

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wavy, Microfix

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[Microfix]

LoneWolf wrote:

Either that, or you have a Quantum Bigfoot drive

Good reference lol, had one of those years ago with Windows 95 (b) OSR2, enough said..

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LoneWolf

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[Graham]

My system has had slow boot times since I had to restore it (to get rid of a problematic anti-virus install.) It does seem at least partially related to the dock, and is at its worst after a BIOS (UEFI) update. I’ve learned to remove it from the dock for the first full boot after a BIOS update. FWIW, my current last BIOS time is a horrifying 49.6 seconds, and nothing reports any problems at all. SMART’s ok, CHKDSK’s ok, etc. I do wonder about the normally inaccessible partitions that Windows uses:  can’t help wondering if there’s a problem with them.

Resume from hibernate is as quick as one would expect, which implies the problem isn’t actually in the BIOS at all.

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