Booting much faster with HDD recently

Hi

I am just curious what made my Thinkpad T440P boot so much faster recently.
Recently, I noticed my Thinkpad, which has Windows on HDD, boot up faster and the HDD acitivity is less busy.
Before, the HDD would be pegged at 100% for 5 minutes after log-in and I couldn't do anything productive during the 5 minutes.
Now, the HDD does not go above 50%, and I can start opening up Edge almost immediately.

What did MS do? Anyhow, I am happy.

Recently the only driver update is Lenovo-Monitor-6.14.20.0 on 30/11/2023.
I see update KB5033372 and KB5032189 on 14/12/2023 and 17/11/2023, respectively.

- - - Updated - - -

I just realize I did download the app Lenovo Commercial Vantage recently.
And I did a BIOS mod to remove the Lenovo whitelist, a few months ago.

Massarelda said:

Hi

I am just curious what made my Thinkpad T440P boot so much faster recently.
Recently, I noticed my Thinkpad, which has Windows on HDD, boot up faster and the HDD acitivity is less busy.
Before, the HDD would be pegged at 100% for 5 minutes after log-in and I couldn't do anything productive during the 5 minutes.
Now, the HDD does not go above 50%, and I can start opening up Edge almost immediately.

What did MS do? Anyhow, I am happy.

The only driver update recently is Lenovo-Monitor-6.14.20.0 on 30/11/2023.
Recently I see update KB5033372 and KB5032189 on 14/12/2023 and 17/11/2023, respectively.

When you first boot a computer, that 5 minutes where it's hard to do things sometimes, is because of all the Delayed Start Services.

In the pic below you can see the various "startup types" for the Services.
I would guess that if an update helped speed up your computer, it's probably because MS changed some of the startup types.
Or... they may have changed which Services are actually "running".





There could be other things that caused the change, but this seems the most probable, to me.

Massarelda said:

Oh! I totally forgot about the 16-Gig RAM upgrade recently. It used to be 4-Gig. LoL.

LOL
That also may have something to do with it.

As you have a HDD I guess you're already using Fast Startup.

Disk 'busyness' after logon is as you'll know is primarily dictated by your startups loading.

I have a Lenovo t440s - with a SSD- takes under 9s to lock screen from a cold boot, but then takes a while to launch startups and populate the tray.

And thank you for your reply. F Startup only applies if you have a HDD. My comment about that is unrelated to the change you experienced. Just thought you'd want to use it if you wanted faster boot, unless it causes problems as it can.

It looks very much like the improvement is due to recent RAM upgrade.

So, the moral here is: get more RAM asap if your machine have 4-Gig or less.