Exceptionally long boot times (8+ minutes) after installing Fall CU.

Hello'n'stuff! I've installed the Fall Creator's Update today! Yaaaay!.. ... Okay, no. It's a service pack that I forgot to defer for at least six months, so of course something goes wrong on at least one of my systems.

The system in question is a gaming laptop with an i7-6700k, 64 gigs of RAM, two Samsung 960 Pro SSDs in Raid0 (Yes, I have daily backups goin', don't worry), GTX 980 (Desktop GPU in a laptop form factor).. Point is, it's fast.

POSTing takes ages because it has to walk the memory, and obviously that takes a while with 64 gigs, but once it POSTs, pre-update, it took less than five seconds to boot. The Windows boot screens loaded so fast that they didn't even fade in before it flashed to the next phase.

Now, after POSTing, booting takes an average of eight minutes. Clearly something's up! It even does this in Safe Mode, so this very clearly related to the Fall CU that was installed right as this started happening.

Again, to be massively clear, this began happening after installing the Fall CU. I knew it was coming, so I made a point to do a fresh boot (no fastboot), do nothing but install the update, and reboot twice afterwards. Right from the first reboot (Even while the update was installing) it's always been taking this long.

ntbtlog doesn't report anything odd compared to another system that also got the Fall CU but has the same startup time as before.


Other odd things I've noticed:

Right after installing the Fall CU, it took *ages* for the computer to turn off. I figure this is due to Windows Update expecting me to leave the computer on for a few hours so it can slowly update remaining files rather than doing it all at once and eating up more of my time. The computer doesn't take long to turn off anymore, just on.

Enabling Fast Boot fixes the slow booting, but I had that turned off before because it was giving me some wicked issues and turning Fast Boot off fixed them. I don't know if that'll still be the case, but I still don't want to use it if it's possible to avoid it; I don't like the notion that I have a few gigabytes written to two SSDs in Raid0 every time I turn my computer off, and I run some fairly non-standard hardware considering its obvious financial cost, so I'd prefer to go through a full initialization at every boot instead of partially waking from hibernation.

After booting from Safe Mode back to normal mode, a browser window opened automatically and headed over to Microsoft's support page. Is this normal?


The Task Manager is acting really weird. If I go to the Startup tab, it claims the BIOS time is longer with each boot or reboot. Right now it's claiming it's over 4,000 seconds, and that definitely isn't accurate! It seems to go up by however long Windows takes to boot and then never resets its self. I feel like this might be related to the issue I'm experiencing, but I don't know where to begin tracking the specifics down. My normal gut instinct would be to look around in the BIOS, but Sager doesn't give its users much control in that regard. Aside from the usual overclocking stuff, I can adjust the date and time. That's basically it.

Secure Boot is disabled, for what it's worth. Trying to get Linux working with that on was a massive headache.



Anyway, that's what I've got now. Any help would be appreciated!

Thank you for the welcome!

I did mean to say Fast Startup throughout that post, my mistake.

As I stated in my first post, toggling the Fast Startup option in the GUI does have an affect; disabling it causes the system to take over eight minutes to boot, enabling it makes it take 10-15 seconds. However, as I'm on a SSD, I'm sure you can understand why I'd like to have the setting disabled, but also not take eight whole minutes to boot.

Again, to be clear, before the Fall CU, with Fast Startup disabled, I'd only take five seconds to boot.

'Tis okay! I'm already super-duper thankful that you're not giving me advice like "Did you try rebooting it?" or "Did you try disabling your AV?" and other stuff like that! (I've been on way too many forums where those kinds of suggestions seem to be the best solutions anyone can offer for any sort of problem. x.x... I mean, they help a lot of people, but when I post a question and ask for help, it's because I tried all the stuff like that and none of it worked.)

I haven't! Let's seeeeee.... Okay, all the devices appear fine. No mean-looking exclamations anywhere. I don't know what specific things are Sager-branded, though, or at least supposed to be. Ugh. Gah. Checking which ones are supposed to be is a crazy amount of trouble; they don't actually keep a sane list.

Do you know of any way to check how long each driver and service is taking to load? That'd probably be the best thing, but half of me figures you would've already said so if you had a tool for that.

I installed it today, less than 24 hours ago. I have a full disk image with my previous install on it (though it's dated) and Backblaze's last backup was recent for the stuff that wasn't included in the image, so I can theoretically go back whenever, but I'd rather avoid having to go through all that trouble, obviously. Can't download the backup right now anyway; I'd go over my bandwidth limits.

Anyway, later I'll start going over the drivers for kicks. The annoying thing is that this didn't happen with the first CU earlier this year, but I managed to defer that for like six months and got the service pack with the fix-for-the-service-pack after it at the same time. I didn't know that that pack'd change my settings to not defer stuff, and I had this vague hope in Microsoft to not mess this one up. Sure learned my lesson. Again. <w<'