Very VERY slow boot Windows 10

I have an acquaintance with a Dell desktop - not sure what model. It's running Windows 10 Home as far as I know, and it's slow. WAY slow.
Even booting it's slow - it can take the thing anywhere from 8 - 10 MINUTES to get to the login screen.

I'm working from a zoom screen, so I'm trying to help remotely. I can't even go in reliably using Quick Assist because their Internet connection incredibly slow - lag time in Zoom is usually between 4 and 10 seconds.

I've looked at several things on the Internet about slow boot and none of them had anything useful - turn off Fast Boot was about it. And that's off.

I've never had a system that was this slow to boot, so I'm not sure where to even start looking.

I do know the BIOS has the disks set to RAID and they don't have a RAID, but I'm not sure that would do anything.

Can someone point me to a reasonably good discussion of how to fix a very slow booting system? Or throw out some likely culprits? I even had them unplug things like the webcam and external HDD to see if that would help. It didn't.

Ideas?

I have an acquaintance with a Dell desktop - not sure what model. It's running Windows 10 Home as far as I know, and it's slow. WAY slow.

What is the exact 7-character "service tag" number on that Dell desktop?

Does it still have all of its original hardware, or has certain hardware been added or upgraded in it?

I'm not there, I've been trying to help by Zoom. I'll see if I can get the service tag from the person. As far as I know, the box is the way it came from dell. It's got an I7-8700, 2 2TB HDD, 32GB of memory and an Nvidia 1050 GPU, but that's about all I know. They've no got an external HDD connected for backups.

Performance when it's up and running is pretty abysmal in tools like Lightroom or Photoshop, but mostly it's just an absolute pig at boot.

The Windows Performance Analyzer sends you to the Microsoft Store where they say it doesn't exist.

I'm not there, I've been trying to help by Zoom. I'll see if I can get the service tag from the person. As far as I know, the box is the way it came from dell. It's got an I7-8700, 2 2TB HDD, 32GB of memory and an Nvidia 1050 GPU, but that's about all I know.

Please obtain the 7-character "service tag" number so we can confirm its identity and what hardware it came with.

Assuming it has an Intel Core i7-8700 3.20 GHz 6-core processor and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 graphics card and 32 GB of DDR4 RAM, it definitely shouldn't be running slow.

Since you're not there to see what's installed and running in it, and how well it's been maintained, there can be several reasons why it has the speed and performance of a turtle.

It appears the user wasn't even aware that drivers and such needed updating. And using the WPA will be well beyond their capability. They're going to try to get the service tag, but this problem is going to be well beyond what I can do by Zoom.

For the time being, this can be set aside. I'll recommend they update drivers and see how that goes.

GracieAllen said:

It appears the user wasn't even aware that drivers and such needed updating. And using the WPA will be well beyond their capability. They're going to try to get the service tag, but this problem is going to be well beyond what I can do by Zoom.

For the time being, this can be set aside. I'll recommend they update drivers and see how that goes.

Why don't you try TeamViewer. It's free.
You and the other side download TeamViewer. Both run it. Choose Run only (one time use)
By phone or Zoom, they give you the ID and password and you will get control of their computer.

Have helped people on other countries. Very good

Try first a disk check
Open a CMD window as administrator and type:
chkdsk c: /f
It will say your disk is in use and ask if you want to schedule to next start = yes
Restart
Pay attention on the results, specially bad blocks, bad clusters, bad sectors etc

Back to Windows, open a CMD window as administrator and type:
sfc /scannow

If it finds any corrupted files, fixing or not, reboot and run again

The first thing that comes to mind is that the HDD is failing. Both Windows and the drive itself 'knows' when a drive is failing. When it reads or writes a 'bad' sector, it will re-try the operation some predetermined number of times. 10? 20? 50? I don't know how many times. For write operations, it will 'assign' a spare sector in place of the failing one and put the data there.

To find out if the drive is failing, download a free utility: 'clear disk info' (Google it) and review the information in the green-highlighted bars. Of special importance are the last 3 green items under 'critical attributes'.

If the drive shows low numbers under 'critical attributes', it's probably not a drive problem.

It could also be a heavily fragmented hard drive. When's the last time it was de-fragmented? But then, most friends' computers I've dealt with have a 1-3 TB hard drive and barely 300 GB used. However, fragmentation could still be a problem.

Another major cause of really-slow bootup times is bloatware and other freebies that can get installed and come in at startup time. Dell is notorious at puting a lot of Dell-only bloatware in their computers. A lot of downloadable software such as Adobe PDF Reader, comes with a freebie or two that unless looked for and specifically un-selected, will get loaded whether wanted or not. I vaguely recall the PDF reader coming with a freebie McAfee anti-virus product that then gets added into the 'to do' list at startup. That most likely means there's two A/V products running concurrently and they're 'fighting' each other to make sure everything is safe to go. Another biggie to check for is multiple, competing, cloud services such as Drop Box. Each of them have to go through a 'synchronization' activity between the cloud and their corresponding folders during boot up. Depending on the size of what's in those cloud folders, it could take seemingly forever to synchronize.

Take a look at the 'startup' tab in the task manager. I'm guessing there could be LOTS of items there, many of which may be useless. But every one of those has to start up as Windows starts up. Some before it asks for the user password and some after. Perhaps there's a number of those that can be turned off and that will improve startup times and overall performance.

For what it's worth, I have several friends that call me over once every couple of years to 'speed up' their computer. It's always been far too many bloatware and freebies causing the problem. One by one, I ask them 'do you use xxx?', and if not, I turn it off, either by removing the application altogether (like conflicting anti-virus/internet security products), or simply change it to 'manual' startup in the 'services' folder inside the old-reliable 'control panel'. When done, their computers boot up in about a minute or so and they're overjoyed.

Taking over their computer isn't feasible. Their bandwidth is non-existent. On a GOOD day they'll get maybe 3Mbps. It'll run a meeting at low resolution (1920x1080), but just turning on the screen sharing makes the audio gibberish.

But, next time I go up there I can check the drives and stuff like that. I can also update some drivers and such.

As for bloatware - everything that ever came on there is still there. Including all the junk from Dell. I can use Black Viper's site to kill some of the services, but I have no idea what Dell things can be done away with. I've done some searching but haven't found anyone listing all the Dell bloat that can be dumped.

So, there are things I can do, but I don't want to get into something massively convoluted like apparently WPA is on someone else's computer.