Question Windows 10 slow boot times

[pcswig13]

Hello. I am working on a 2018 model HP Pavilion desktop. Specs are:
CPU i5-7400, 16gb DDR4, AMD Radeon R9 M360, WD 1TB 3.5 mechanical drive, original BIOS (AMI F.14, date 2017)

The stock WD 3.5 inch 1TB drive was full (customer creates videos), and the boot times were terrible as you can imagine. Based on the age, and need to retain the data, I replaced the tired WD 3.5 inch spinning drive with a brand new 2 TB WD_Black SN770. It took 2 hrs (using Macrium Reflect) to clone the drive, and the machine runs pretty good now, BUT....the boot times are still very slow. I'm talking 5 minutes. Once it is up, the performance is terrific. I ran SFC/scannnow, and it reported some damaged files were replaced. I rebooted, and still, boot times are super slow. I had assumed the NVMe drive would have fixed that.

Looking at the Event Viewer/Windows Log/System, I see lots of Warning messages about "Local Activation Permissions" and a few "Error" messages about failed "LMS services". I do not have the depth of knowledge to know how to address those errors, and am not sure if that has to do with the slow boot times.

Any suggestions?

Thank you in advance.

 

[mikeymikec]

Did the boot times improve after installing the SSD?

It makes sense that it would have had Win10 on from the start (as opposed to Win81 / 7), but it's worth asking just in case.

A Win10 PC booting off a hard drive shouldn't take 5 minutes to boot Windows. 1.5 to get to the desktop, sure (and obviously a SSD should be much faster, like 30 seconds at most). What other software do you have installed, particularly stuff that loads during startup? What security software are you using? At what point is it using up the 5 minutes, with the circles going round, or user login, or what?

 

[pcswig13]

Did the boot times improve after installing the SSD?

It makes sense that it would have had Win10 on from the start (as opposed to Win81 / 7), but it's worth asking just in case.

A Win10 PC booting off a hard drive shouldn't take 5 minutes to boot Windows. 1.5 to get to the desktop, sure (and obviously a SSD should be much faster, like 30 seconds at most). What other software do you have installed, particularly stuff that loads during startup? What security software are you using? At what point is it using up the 5 minutes, with the circles going round, or user login, or what?

The SSD did very minimally improve boot times, i.e. it went from >7 minutes on average with the spinning drive, to 5 minutes on the SSD. The 5 minutes are with the HP logo and spinning dots. The last 20 seconds or so just prior to the login screen displaying is a totally blank (black) screen. Once the login screen is displayed, and I enter the credentials, the machine is working as expected - pretty darn fast.

RE startup apps - Dropbox is used heavily by the owner (part of his business processes), and old version of AMD User Experience app (I disabled after the first few long boot cycles), and an expired version of Norton Security caused some issues. I also removed the Norton. The only other apps used are mostly web based things for his business.

 

[pcswig13]

Hold the phone!
Thank you for pointing out the obvious - software issues! I disabled the Dropbox client in the Startup group, and the darn thing boots to the login screen in 10 seconds now. It has done this for 3 cycles of "Shut down", wait 30 seconds, and power on.
Thanks again for asking that very basic question. I was so focused on the hardware, the apps getting in the way didn't register.

 

[mikeymikec]

I doubt that Dropbox has any services to start which would affect the pre-login start time (even if it did, simply disabling the startup item wouldn't have made any difference since task manager startup items are userland during the login process startup processes, not pre-login), so my bet is that Norton was the true culprit here, and that the first truly clean boot post uninstall and post Norton running cleanup processes during the first reboot.

Re-enable Dropbox, I bet it's still fine.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I doubt that Dropbox has any services to start which would affect the pre-login start time (even if it did, simply disabling the startup item wouldn't have made any difference since task manager startup items are userland during the login process startup processes, not pre-login), so my bet is that Norton was the true culprit here, and that the first truly clean boot post uninstall and post Norton running cleanup processes during the first reboot.

Re-enable Dropbox, I bet it's still fine.

Norton?!! NOR-ton?!!! I remember troubles with that going back 15, 20 years ago!! Earlier than that, we relied on it, at least before the Millennium. Geee-eeZ!!

Now that I'm on the soapbox, I've been through several AV suites, but we got rid of Norton soon enough. Finally just settled on the conventional wisdom -- though not universally known -- that Windows Defender with MalwareBytes running with it was the better choice. I'm sure there are other combinations and options, but this one has saved me time, trouble and money. And I still have to pay MalwareBytes from time to time!