Very slow boot times (7-8 mins.)!!!

donse · 19 Mar 2024

Help needed pls.:
Very slow boot times (7-8 mins.!).
Furthermore slow access to disk management and drive properties of all (SSD) drives, USB media etc.
Also very slow start when copying/moving files between folders/drives.

System:[
Windows 10 Pro (22H2)
OS SSD: Samsung SSD 980 PRO 1TB - Free space app. 392 GB (running PCIe 4.0 x4)
MSI MAG x570 Tomahawk WiFi
AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core Processor 3.60 GHz
RAM 2 x 32GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-3200 C16 BK
NVIDIA Geforce RTX3060 Ti 8GB

I've done:
- Startup at absolute minimum (only 4 services Enabled)
- Disable Fast Startup (slowness persisted)
- Chkdsk, HDDScan and CrystalDiskInfo: no errors
- MemTest86 and Win10-mdsched.exe: no errors (but correct PCIe 4.0 x4)
- Win10 in-place repair from ISO (slowness persisted)

Event Viewer - Boot event logs:
List of event IDs 100 and 200 available (.docx)

dalchina · 20 Mar 2024

Hi, if you care to search tenforums you will find a good number of threads on 'slow boot' etc.
Once again.. the analytical tool used to diagnose this is the WPA (Windows Performance Recorder and Analyser) free from MS.
Download and Install Windows Performance Toolkit in Windows 10
Please get a copy of this.

You can find examples of its use and screenshots and samples of the settings used in capturing traces in the various threads.
It is a technical tool requiring some familiarity and expertise. @zinou is the member with the most experience- if you are patient he may well come to help you.

History: (so often not stated)
When did this start?
What change was made or occurred around this time?

As this could be related to a recent update, please post a screenshot of your Update History.
Include the list of driver updates at the bottom.

As requested by the forum post your EXACT full Windows build using 'winver'. E.g. 19045.4170. (Or see Settings, About).

Please confirm that when you boot you have NO external devices connected.
You mention multiple drives. Please confirm you only have 1 SSD in your laptop.
If not, provide details of your other disk(s) and confirm you checked these with Crystal Diskinfo.

The PC in your post is presumably not the one in your specs. Please provide make and model.

If it's a desktop with multiple disks, please disconnect the other disks and try booting with only the system disk in place, and then advise your boot time.

Please state the time from a cold boot to lock screen appearing.

Thanks.

Megahertz · 20 Mar 2024

- Do a disk check
Most occasions a very slow boot is due to a problematic HDD
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

Most occasions a very slow boot is due to a problematic HDD. If you have any other drive attached, please also run chkdsk X: /f on it (replace X with the assigned drive letter)

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

Then run
Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth
and
Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

- Run disk cleanup (%windir%\system32\cleanmgr.exe)

dalchina · 20 Mar 2024

Further: one surprising cause of slow booting (but you seem to have other issues as well) is the accumulation of temporary files. 3 or 4 users have reported that clearing those has helped a lot.

(See relevant threads for examples).

Helmut · 20 Mar 2024

"- Startup at absolute minimum (only 4 services Enabled)"

Normally there would be around 60-70 services, so reducing that to 4 will inevitably introduce bootup, startup and other problems.

"- Disable Fast Startup (slowness persisted)"

Why, that is there to speed up the startup by reducing the checks during startup.
You would only disable that if you wanted more checks and of course longer startup time.

Megahertz · 20 Mar 2024

Helmut said:

"- Disable Fast Startup (slowness persisted)"

Why, that is there to speed up the startup by reducing the checks during startup.
You would only disable that if you wanted more checks and of course longer startup time.

In my opinion, with a SSD, fast startup is more part of problem than part of a solution.
Fast startup use a mix of normal boot and hibernation.
Leave it disabled

dalchina · 21 Mar 2024

Agree- especially in this case. For a few users, Fast Startup does cause real issues. Where it works normally and the user is using a SSD, the time saving is minimal. It's intended to reduce cold boot time - but is only significant where the system disk is a HDD.

The Pros and Cons of Windows 10's "Fast Startup" Mode

Further, where hibernation is not required, this can also be disabled saving a lot of disk space, the same space being used to support Fast Startup.

donse · 21 Mar 2024

dalchina said:

Further: one surprising cause of slow booting (but you seem to have other issues as well) is the accumulation of temporary files. 3 or 4 users have reported that clearing those has helped a lot.
(See relevant threads for examples).

I clean up regularly and there's 482 GB of free space outta the total of 1T on the system C drive (NVMe) ... will that cause such problems, you think?

- - - Updated - - -

Thx for you help, dalchina :))

dalchina said:

Hi, if you care to search tenforums you will find a good number of threads on 'slow boot' etc.
Once again.. the analytical tool used to diagnose this is the WPA

Yes, there's plenty of threads w. boot problems. I've spend long time there already however failing to find really 'relevant-similar' as well as failing to reach a positive result by following the recommendations found there this far as you see...

I'm having a Win10 build 19045.3803 and I'm not sure I understand this correctly but for using the WPA there's no download match for 19045.3803 it seems (?)

dalchina said:

History: (so often not stated)
When did this start?

Sometime back in february - I've been getting by with a Macbook Pro M1 Max and not using the Win-machine very much at all since partly due to a too busy schedule (procrastination invoked)

dalchina said:

What change was made or occurred around this time?

I have no idea really. Nothing major install comes to mind at all (maybe actually a cleanup by the not-Piriform-anymore-CCleaner is all that I can possibly think of).

dalchina said:

As this could be related to a recent update, please post a screenshot of your Update History.
Include the list of driver updates at the bottom

Will do

dalchina said:

Please confirm that when you boot you have NO external devices connected.
You mention multiple drives. Please confirm you only have 1 SSD in your laptop.
If not, provide details of your other disk(s) and confirm you checked these with Crystal Diskinfo.

System is completely stripped of all. There's only two SSDs left respectively on the M2_1 (OS) and M2_2 PCIe 4.0 (x4) slots on the Tomahawk x570 (It's a bleeding pain to get the M2_2 out of there hence I left it also assuming it was likely to be of minor relevance after testing both of them negative with Chkdsk, HDDScan and CrystalDiskInfo.

Note: It's NOT a labtop exactly but a rather tall big 'ol Lian Li ATX tower w. a load of HDDs in RAID 1 on a fast SAS Adaptec 8805 real-hardware RAID.

But everything incl. all of this is dismantled here now of course. RAID worked fine as such though. With regard to the RAID storage it seemed rather to be a system issue when ever using finder for transfers etc. System almost stalled for a while as already said whereas the actual transfers where quick enough once they finally got under way. Same thing w. transfers between the two NMVe on the MB PCIe.

Also services like disk management and device manager took for ever to launch (!).
And still does - there's no positive performance change in any respect after removing all the auxiliaries and the Adaptec Microsemi 8805.

dalchina said:

The PC in your post is presumably not the one in your specs. Please provide make and model.

The list is accurate (homegrown though - and used to be quite fast):

System:
Windows 10 Pro (22H2) Build 19045.3803
OS SSD on M2_1: Samsung SSD 980 PRO 1TB - Free space app. 413GB (running PCIe 4.0 x4)
Workspace SSD on M2_2 (for video editing): Samsung SSD 980 PRO 2TB - Free space app. 31.7GB (running PCIe 4.0 x4)
MSI MAG x570 Tomahawk WiFi
AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core Processor 3.60 GHz
RAM 2 x 32GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-3200 C16 BK
NVIDIA Geforce RTX3060 Ti 8GB

Note: In the process now of freeing up space on the M2_2 SSD in case the the humble 31.7GB of free space is adding to the problem.

dalchina said:

If it's a desktop with multiple disks, please disconnect the other disks and try booting with only the system disk in place, and then advise your boot time.

That's what's been recorded already in the provided Event Viewer Boot event logs (i.e event IDs 100 and 200 in particular I believe). Will that suffice?

Thank you

dalchina · 22 Mar 2024

I'm having a Win10 build 19045.3803 and I'm not sure I understand this correctly but for using the WPA there's no download match for 19045.3803 it seems (?)

I've not seen users reporting issues getting a copy.
There's even a version available using the Store.

- Startup at absolute minimum (only 4 services Enabled)

If that's really so, I'd expect quite a lot of things won't function.

Please revert services to default- carefully. (Tutorial available if needed).
Once done, again note cold boot time to lock screen and advise.

That's what's been recorded already in the provided Event Viewer Boot event logs

Maybe you intended to attach or link a document.

A simple statement of time would be helpful.

You mention February- please check for any significant driver updates around this time.
One way to get 3rd party driver install dates is to run this Powershell code - it takes a few seconds to start generating an output:
powershell - Get Driver Install Dates - Stack Overflow

donse · 22 Mar 2024

Thx. Megahertz.
All of the actions suggested have already been implemented,
Sadly to no avail.

- - - Updated - - -

Boot time:
Coldboot from push on Power button to lock screen appearing 6:21-6:51 (Shutdown app 3:40-4:50)
The Boot Performance Monitoring log (from Event Viewer) attached below here too.

ADK (the Windows Performance Toolkit):

dalchina said:

I've not seen users reporting issues getting a copy.
There's even a version available using the Store.

Indeed there’s plenty of ADK-downloads available, yes.
But none seem to match my Win10 Build 19045.3803 1:1.

Pls see here below the list displayed when entering [download: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/wi...d/adk-install] of the page you kindly linked to:

Option 1) Download the ADK for Windows 10, version 2004:
Windows ADK for Windows 10, version 2004
Windows PE add-on for the ADK, version 2004
This ADK supports Windows 10, version 2004, and later versions of Windows 10
Note: Before applying a more recent update to the Windows PE add-on, verify the pre-requisite Servicing Stack Update (SSU) in KB5026361 has been applied first. See apply Windows update to the Windows PE media for how to apply SSU.
Download the ADK for Windows 10, version 1903:

Option 2) Windows ADK for Windows 10, version 1903
Windows PE add-on for ADK, version 1903
What's new in ADK for Windows 10, version 1903.
You can use this version to deploy Windows 10, version 1909 as well.
Download the ADK for Windows 10, version 1809:

Option 3) Windows ADK for Windows 10, version 1809
Windows PE add-on for ADK, version 1809
What's new in ADK for Windows 10, version 1809
New as of Windows 10, version 1809, Windows Preinstallation Environment (PE) is avalable separately form the Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK)

Option 4) ADK for Windows 10, version 1803
What's new in ADK for Windows 10, version 1803

Option 5) ADK for Windows 10, version 1709
What's new in ADK for Windows 10, version 1709.
For IoT Core for Windows 10, version 1709, also download the IoT Core Add-Ins v4.4.

Option 6) ADK for Windows 10, version 1703
What's new in ADK for Windows 10, version 1703.
For IoT Core for Windows 10, version 1703, also download the IoT Core Add-Ins v3.2.

Option 7) ADK for Windows 10, version 1607
What's new in ADK for Windows 10, version 1607.
For IoT Core for Windows 10, version 1607, also download the IoT Core Add-Ins v2.0 (14393_v1).

This is way over my head hence having zero clue as to what might be correct/better for Build 19045.3803 (i.e. not showing here as an option).

Startup Services and updates:
Pls see attached screenshot of what services enabled/disabled (This is in Task Manager only. I’ve not touched anything else regarding startup services etc.).

Pls in same list of screenshots also see complete list of updates.