Windows 10 slow boot

I used to make money from fixing PCs that had been used by grandchildren. They are dangerous....

Why is it slow. Have you run taskmanger to see what is using CPU cycles? Is it CPU cycles or a Disk bottle neck? .. go to the details TAB and sort by CPU. Have the games loaded background tasks...

For the slow startup go into the "settings" app, "Apps", "Startup" see if you can turn things ohh...

pointless. you need to un-install...

Ah letting Linux admins loose on Windows is even worse than a 12 year old....

OK, but is it Spinning rust or SSD. After a Windows update Windows spends a lot of time indexing. On spinning rust its slow...

.... ghost files are images. I think there is a ghost explorer you can get to extract files...

I cannot see any . In fact once the thing has booted up none of the processes seem to be using much resource and I can see no games running

Just a user

Sata HDD Seagate barracuda 1TB

Thanks I'll search for it

Did you check this? Microsoft also have a tool call "autoruns" you can download from live.sysinternals.com which lets you look at everything that runs at startups/logon.

Just a thought, does it also have McAfee loaded. For most people windows defender is ok.

Clone to a new SSD and use for backup or bin it after wiping it. Hard disks slow as they fragment. Windows does some defragging but they still slow.

SSDs don't slow. I haven't had a HDD

Dave

But Win 7 onwards allows such evil users to be ringfenced in such a way that downloads, format and other ill-thoughtout behaviour can only be done by someone with admin privilege

Multi minute boots are not uncommon with HDDs - you tend to forget once you have used SSDs for a while!

However listening carefully can also give some clues on a HDD. One that is having difficulty reading sectors, but is managing to recover with multiple retries will be very slow.

Task manager also has a tap that lets you disable some startup programs. Teams seems to be one the pops up and takes quite a bit of time to load at book, so knobbing that can help.

One of the things about this installation is that it seems to boot straight into an admin account without needing to log in with a password.

This is probably a good idea, which program do you suggest?

de-fragging or cloning... .. I usually buy an SSD that has a cloning programming ....

.. de-fragging - waste of time. its like trying to stop the tide...

Dave

A Pentium G3320 is from the year 2013. If the motherboard is UEFI, it's an earlier version of UEFI, but should still work. There won't be a TPM (just a header to plug it in, on consumer devices of that era). The TPM available at the time might have been version 1.4 or so.

In the WinXP era, there was Bootvis, which was a tool humans could use. You could get a bootup trace from it.

The tools now are like this, but even this may have been discontinued at some point.

I:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.1\Windows Performance Toolkit\xbootmgr.exe <=== trace capture I:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.1\Windows Performance Toolkit\xperf.exe <=== view the trace graphical output

You could make a folder anywhere for output, and C:\TEMP is being used here. This should cause the machine to reboot, and do a trace of activity.

xbootmgr -trace boot -traceFlags BASE+CSWITCH+DRIVERS+POWER -resultPath C:\TEMP

If that requires WADK, don't panic. There should be a dialog with tick boxes, and all that needs to be ticked in the download suite, is the Windows Performance Toolkit or similar. The other parts of WADK are independent and not needed. It should only take five minutes to download the utilities, and check to see if xbootmgr and xperf are in that version.

The baffling ones, are when there is a 50 second slice of time on the screen, with no activity at all from anything. That seems to involve a scan of system memory by some process, like perhaps it is encrypting system memory or initializing system memory. When there is no activity in view, it's pretty hard to "blame" a process. That's a limitation of the concept. But as long as an activity is a "visible" one, such as something a rogue game could be doing, that may leave footprints on the screen as to who is doing it.

Long delays at boot, can be due to permanently mounted file shares, and the file share is no longer available. That can cause a ten minute delay at startup. But we know it isn't that.

It could be CHKDSK, but we know that has a specific screen output, and you would know it was going on.

Another way to do a boot trace, is with Sysinternals Process Monitor. But I've had some degree of trouble getting that to start and do the trace at startup. That leaves a DLL like "procmon23.dll" as a hidden file in System32. Using "dir /ah" in Command Prompt, when cd'ed to System32, might help you see that it is present. The program does not have a means to remove it. Normally, it does no harm sitting there. That is just so you have some idea, how it can be doing a boot trace, right after autochk or so. Autochk is just before the C: partition mounts.

If the previous section made your eyes glaze over, there are easier things to attempt, with less assurance of perfection as a result. There is "Repair Install" as an attempt at a solution.

Start : Run : winver.exe

That's a program that shows you the current Windows version. Maybe it is Win10 22H2 19045.xxxx or so. If you have the ISO file for the installer DVD, you can right click the ISO and select "Mount". when the virtual DVD drive appears in File Explorer or Disk Management, you can run "setup.exe" off the root level of the virtual DVD, and that kicks off a Repair Install. You would want to "match" the version of OS. If Winver reported 22H2 as the version, then the current download of Win10 materials is also 22H2. I usually change the file name on my ISO files, so I know which one is 22H2. Sometimes, the tools make a file "Windows.iso" which tells us nothing. I change the name to "windows10-22H2-x64.iso".

Doing a Repair Install, should report it is keeping your Programs and your User Data. It will try to do Windows Update, to at least make the Windows Update components current. Even if you think the OS is up to date, the stupid thing will waste time updating. Then, finally, it will run the install. You need maybe 40GB of slack space on C: , for a Repair Install to take place. There will be a C:\Windows.old folder if the installation was successful, and you don't throw that folder away by hand. The second level of Cleanmgr.exe can remove it. I prefer to use a system tool for this, because there have been a couple nasty bits of business in C: on some older versions of Win10, that a manual command will foul up (unprintable UTF-8 characters).

That is typically a "least effort" approach to repair, for an end user. You don't have to know how to do anything, except click the "Setup.exe" on the virtual DVD and run it. On the other hand, it doesn't remove Malware, and it doesn't flush garbage out of the Registry particularly. It's also possible you could receive a warning to remove a program or two, if they are a known source of mischief at the beginning of the install. For example, I removed VirtualBox 5 and installed VirtualBox 6 to get past one of those warnings.

Summary: A Repair Install is the less adventurous way to try to fix it. Other methods, have a learning curve, but at least you should know there are some things that an intermediate level person can do.

You do a Repair Install from a running OS. If the OS won't run at all, that is no longer an option for you. Doing it from Safe Mode, there might not be enough subsystems running for that to work.

To use Task Manager to analyze what is going on, sure, that's a good suggestion "if you know what normal looks like". It's not always easy to spot stuff which is totally off the wall in there. If you see six "run something or other" in there, is that normal ? To be honest with you, I don't know the answer, but I've seen that. Some activities do not seem normal, but they are likely just regular maintenance.

Paul

Windows 10 on has "Trim" built it so you don't need an extra program. Don't de-frag an SSD, you will just use up its limited number of write cycles for no reason.

did you mean nobbling rather than knobbing? :-D

Uneccessary on SSD as well. The seek time is zero.

I was going to suggest using msconfig but I see that programmes that run at start up are now to be found under Task Manager / Startup tab (ctrl/alt/delete or right click on bottom task bar to select).

I've used several free cloning programmes over the years. The last one was Disk Genius. Very easy to use. -

I have Windows 10 pro 22H2 edition, i5-3470, 8GB ram, UEFI, WD500 HDD.

Rarely gets rebooted but I just tried, and it took 1 minute to get to 'Please wait' and then 90 seconds more before I could log on. Event viewer shows nothing for the 90 seconds.

Not only unnecessary, but advised not to be used.

I daresay there *are* events logged, just that they're not in one of the "traditional" (system/application/security) logs, instead look at the myriad .evtx logs

No, but I did mean "tab" rather than "tap" :-)

Presumably with the electronic equivalent of a knobkerrie...