Very VERY slow boot Windows 10

You just nailed it...very slow bandwidth. Windows 'checks in' with Microsoft HQ whenever it boots. If bandwidth is terrible, whatever 'discussion' that takes place between computer and Microsoft HQ will take a LONG time. At a minimum, it's verifying that it's a legitimate version of Windows 10. It wouldn't surprise me, either, if it sends Microsoft a list of installed programs as well. Throw in OneDrive or other cloud service(s) demanding bandwidth to synchronize at startup, the dismal bandwidth would seem to be the main culprit.

I know they have OneDrive on, but insist they never use it, or even know what it is...

If and when I go up there, maybe I'll take one of my portable routers and use my cell - it was showing upwards of 36Mbps when I was there once before - and put it on that system and see if it helps.

I KNOW there are a WHOLE lot of processes showing on that thing that I've never seen before (don't remember what they were), and the user has no idea what they are either. And, of course, the Dell stuff.

Enable or Disable OneDrive Integration

I got to see the system yesterday.

I took a cell phone and router with me, so we had plenty of bandwidth - around 30 Mbps on the system.

On a reboot, it gets to the Post display in about 5 seconds. Pressing F2 and getting into BIOS another 5-6.
Once past that, with the spinning dots, it's another 3:30 before you can log in.
Once you log in it takes anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds for the taskbar to populate.
Starting Word take around 30 seconds to come up. Overall, EVERYTHING is very slow and laggy.

Changed power settings to Ultimate.
Did disk cleanup.
Did a bunch of the other little things recommended to improve boot time and/or performance.
Nothing helped.

Removed EVERY peripheral and internal device except mouse, keyboard, 1 monitor and HDD with O/S. No difference.
Replaced the SATA cable to the HDD. No difference.
Plugged it into a different SATA port. No difference.

Drive has 0% fragmentation.
Did a disk check and it said the drive had errors and it couldn't run.
Did a chkdsk /F/R and that run from just after noon 'til about 9:30 last night.

It may have fixed something, but it ran during boot so no information on what it found. Made no difference.

I've recommended the user run the disk check to see if the errors are fixed or are still there. Waiting to hear.

I figure the next thing is a disk repair, and they're going to try that tonight.

After that, most of what I've read says it's time for a new O/S. The system qualifies for Windows 11, so I thought it might be worth trying the upgrade before trashing the O/S and re-installing. If that doesn't work I presume it's some kind of unknown hardware issue?

A I7-8700, 2 2TB HDD, 32GB of memory and an Nvidia 1050 GPU, it's a excellent hardware. Normally a computer like yours comes with a M.2 NVMe drive that can be twenty times faster than a HDD.
You can install a small SSD (128 or 256G) to have windows and programs and use the HDD for data only. It will boot in seconds and opens programs at the blink of an eye.
Even running on a HDD it shouldn't be that slow.

Must be something with Windows

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 system is a Dell XPS8730, and there's no M.2 drive in there at the moment. It's in a very small mini-tower and I don't know if there's even an M.2 slot. What's currently there is a pair of 2TB HDD and a DVD.

As the previous response says, we did a chkdsk /F/R yesterday and it booted and ran. NO information, other than a line on the screen indicating the chkdsk was running came up. It didn't look anything like my systems do when they run chkdsk at boot.

In any case, after 9 - 10 hours (I started about 11:45 a.m. and finished about 9:30 p.m. - I don't recall it ever taking that long to check and repair a HDD thats only 2TB, but it did), it finished. A check today says there are no errors.

I recommended the user next do:

• Open the command prompt as administrator,
• Next, run DISM command DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth
• When the DISM command has completed, type sfc /scannow command to start scanning and repairing your system files.

That may happen this evening, though there are two users and the other has proclaimed that he "knows a lot about computers", has a bootable flash drive, and wants to do a Windows repair "his way".

I try never to argue with experts as I don't consider myself one...

GracieAllen said:

What's currently there is a pair of 2TB HDD and a DVD.

As the previous response says, we did a chkdsk /F/R yesterday and it booted and ran. NO information, other than a line on the screen indicating the chkdsk was running came up. It didn't look anything like my systems do when they run chkdsk at boot.
In any case, after 9 - 10 hours (I started about 11:45 a.m. and finished about 9:30 p.m. - I don't recall it ever taking that long to check and repair a HDD thats only 2TB, but it did), it finished. A check today says there are no errors.

chkdsk /R takes a very long as it check the hardware (Locates bad sectors and recovers readable information). The disk must be locked. /r includes the functionality of /f, with the additional analysis of physical disk errors.

Please run, as administrator, chkdsk c: /f It will only take some minutes

Download, extract and run Crystal disk info
It is a portable, don't need to be installed. It will read the disk SMART data to see if there is any hardware problem

Seeing that it gets to and through POST very quickly indicates that the problem is within Windows. Doing a Dism and SFC should clean any corrupted Windows files.

Having 2 drives on the computer can also slow down the Windows boot up. Other than my C: SSD, I have a 3 TB 'bulk storage' drive that I have have partitioned into 8 partitions to gang similar files and folders together. I use partitions rather than folders to achieve more optimal directory placement to minimize cylinder-to-cylinder head movement times. I use different cluster sizes than default on 2 partitions as I know files are mostly larger. I've occassionally used the Windows 'copy' function on each partition instead of cloning the entire drive to ensure all the files are 100% contiguous (defragmented) and are adjacent to each other, again to minimize head movement. As my mobo has paired SATA connectors, the SSD is on one pair and the HD on another. The DVD drive is on yet another pair. Whether or not there's 'channel separation' on SATA ports, I have no idea. Yes, I'm very old-school speed and efficiency minded.

I also go to 'unreasonable' lengths to monitor the performance of my computer, even to the point of installing slider-bays that have a drive activity light on each drive...both SSDs and HDs. On my laptop, I installed a shareware drive activity program that shows me what's going on. What I find interesting is that at boot up, Windows, and likely, my internet security software 'takes forever' (5-6 secs) reading the 3TB drive at bootup. I'd estimate there's 20-25K files on the drive and only 2TB have been 'used'.

What's the point of this? I'd surmise that there is almost non-stop drive activity taking place that's causing the slowdown. Perhaps there's so much RAM consumed by automatically started applications that it's causing non-stop page-faults (thrashing, to us old folks). So looking at how many applications are running (or sleeping) may give an indication. One of my monitoring paid-for shareware programs allows me to sort the list of all programs by path, ie, program location. Doing that showed me that my installed Adobe software had 5 separate tasks running concurrently, even though I hadn't started any Adobe applications! I put an end to that by disabling all but the PDF reader update function.

Another potential soft-of 'high' drive activity culprit could be the internet security software that 'protects' files from corruption. From what I gathered by observation, the product I use continually looks for executable files and does a virus check on them, or, perhaps, simply does a checksum on the entire file to verify it hasn't been altered. I turned that function off to increase perceived computer speed.

Windows 'drive management' may be doing continual optimization (defragging), based on settings as well.

Don't forget that each 'cloud' file product checks and rechecks to ensure the files in the cloud match those on your computer, consuming internet bandwidth, processor time, as well as drive bandwidth.

Lastly, it's altogether conceivable that the problem computer is being used as a 'bot' by an unknown party or parties. That would explain everything from slow bootup to incredibly slow internet access. From what little I know about 'bot's, they do everything possible to hide themselves from being detected.

I think the first step would be to download a drive activity monitor application that shows a blinking light on the taskbar for each drive. If that's flashing a lot, even while idle, there's something busily hammering the drive(s).

The next step would be to download a file monitoring product that shows each file being accessed for reading or writing. The product I use produces and updates a separate row of data for each file and allows me to sort any column by clicking on the column header. I just fired up the product I use and it shows, for example, that both Firefox and Thunderbird are 'double checking' things on a number of files each on a regular basis. Numerous files and folders in C:\Users\<userID>\Apdata\Local\Microsoft\Credentials folder are seeing a lot of activity thanks to my internet security software.

In short, it looks like it's necessary to monitor what's happening to find out what the culprit(s) are and then take appropriate action.

On this system, having the second drive makes no difference. With EVERYTHING except the boot drive unplugged, it still takes about 3 ½ minutes for Windows – that’s AFTER it’s through POST and such, to drag itself to the login.

There’s no heavy memory usage going on.

There’s no heavy hard drive usage going on.

There’s no visible massive amount of activity going on. Resource monitor doesn’t show much activity of any kind.

There’s not a lot of unusual stuff sitting there. Everything that’s unnecessary is turned off in Startup.

Task manager show a couple GB in use and nothing to hard drives.

It’s just SLOW. The user says it didn’t USED to be slow. Then it was. I have no idea how long ago this was.
Yes, Adobe has its regular background junk running, but until we fire up Lightroom or Photoshop or Word, the box just sits there. As I said in the earlier post, once you log in it can take up to SIXTY SECONDS for the half dozen icons to show up on the task bar.

Drive management defrags every 30 days. I haven’t seen any indication it’s running abnormally.
Security MAY be doing something bizarre. They’re, in theory, using windows Defender, but I’ve seen “antimalware” processes pop up as well as McAfee processes pop up periodically. I’m not sure what they’re doing.

OneDrive is disabled, and as far as I know, the user has NOTHING gong to or from any Cloud service.

The “bot” or some other malware is definitely a possibility, but I didn’t have a chance to run Malwarebytes or AdwAware while I was there. I BELIEVE the second user was going to do a Windows repair last night. Don’t know if it was actually done.
What file monitor are you using? I checked the Resource Monitor and there wasn’t heavy activity to any HDD, but something else may show more information.

At this point, actually long BEFORE this point, I think the solution is to pick up a small SSD (512GB), pull the system drive, replace it, reinstall Windows 10 from scratch and quit screwing with it...

One option that I brought up was upgrading to Windows 11, thinking that MIGHT fix whatever ails it, but I figure that may just compound the problems with the problems Windows 11 has... Anybody here think that MIGHT be a "quick" fix?

A 3 min startup on a HDD is quite normal.
- Adding a small SSD for Windows and programs will cut to 25 sec.
- More than one antivirus may cause conflict. Remove all but windows Defender.
- A repair install is a good try. I normally do a Clean Install.