3 minute boot time prior to login screen (10 Home 22H2, 10.0.19045)

I run a small IT services company and in my 25 years, I can't say I've encountered anything like this. Here is the back story. The customer had an old Asus laptop running Win 10 Home. He uses several GIS softwares and didn't have the original installation files, keys, etc. All he had was the USB thumb drives (HASP) that some of these softwares use to authenticate. Even worse, the hard drive had 4 partitions and he installed those softwares across the different partitions. Weird setup but it worked for him.

He needed a new laptop, so I got him a Dell Latitude 7430, i7 12th gen, 16GB RAM, 1TB NVMe. As you might know, these business Dells all come with Windows Pro baked into the BIOS. To preserve his setup, I cloned the Asus to the Dell with its Windows 10 Home, and surprisingly, all worked properly, without any fuss. No windows activation needed either.

Since then, he has moved out of state and called me the other day. Recently his laptop now takes several minutes to startup. I remoted in and found that the bulk of the startup time was before the login screen. Once password put in, bootup was pretty much immediate, as you'd expect with such a fast machine.

I did S.M.A.R.T and extended tests on the SSD, all passed using the WD SSD Dashboard software. I temporarily disabled all startup items and non-MS services using msconfig and had the same slow boot.

I did a system tuneup/cleanup using CCleaner, MS Disk Cleanup, Device Cleanup and Rapr.exe. I reset windows up using the tenforums batch file and ensured the system was up to date, a ran all Dell driver and BIOS updates using Dell Command Update 5.0.

I did a deep dive into how to research/log what it's doing during bootup. I stumbled on another tenforums thread and followed those instructions (Win 10 64 bit (1703) boot time too long!). After acquiring the trace file, it appears to be spending over 2 minutes on something called ReadyBoot (also called ReadyBoostDriver - no that Boost is not a typo). Here's a screenshot of the trace.



Here is a OneDrive link to the trace file: https://tekease-my.sharepoint.com/:u...Mrbpg?e=dsRDYj

Any ideas welcome. If there's a way to bypass the timeout or whatever it's doing on Readyboot/Readyboost, happy to try anything. A windows repair reinstall seems a bit risky, I don't want to mess too much, especially since he's out of state and wouldn't know how to get him back to working if it gets messed up.

Thank you!

Might also be worth mentioning to your client that readyboost is a detriment to a new gen computer like his one and he should considering not using it.

Its only still around as a throwback and because things take a while to phase out like we don't really needs this tech today but it can be good for use case.
Today it really only makes sense if you understand how to use it effectively combined with certain purposes. USB sticks can be considerably slower like snail slow and his computer will have a m.2 in it so it will be like opposite ends of the spectrum, the computer will choke and 2 minutes makes sense here.

Thank you everybody for their input, I can confirm this is resolved. Per @zinou, the customer had failed to mention he had inserted a new USB thumb drive that someone else had given him into his Lasuney USB-C hub. After reading zinou's findings, I had the customer remove that thumb drive, all worked fast again. He put it into another USB port on the hub, all was still working fast! But once he put it back into port #1 on his hub, back to slow again.

What I decided to try was backup the contents of the thumb drive, wipe it using diskpart, re-format and copy his files back, and while leaving it in port #1, it was back to fast. So something about the combination of that port and the partition/file structure on that drive was causing the issue.

zinou, if I could ask, could you tell me where in WPA you were able to drill down and find that screenshot you attached?

Thanks to all who took the time to read and help me out!

Believe it or not, another customer came calling today with the same issue. But this time, he has nothing plugged into his LG Gram 16 laptop. Core i7 13th gen, 32GB RAM, 512 NVMe, Win 11 Home 64-bit running 21H2 (build 22000.2295). Yes I know I can upgrade him to 22H2 and will. He just got back from the Bahamas yesterday and said this only started upon his return. I created a trace file and landed on the same ReadyBoot issue, but couldn't figure out how @zinou got to that spot in the WPA generic events graph. So here is the attached trace, maybe you don't mind assisting again?

https://tekease-my.sharepoint.com/:u...PuAzQ?e=LKYEr6