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Win10 Pro Laptop suddenly cold boots extremely slow

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WonderWoman

Active Member
Jan 22, 2016
44
7
Hello,


I am a help desk tech with 25 yrs experience so pretty skilled I would say. I am having a sudden issue with my personal laptop. It has recently as in within the past week started taking an unusually long time to get Windows to start from a cold boot. I wind up sitting for approximately 3-5 minutes with just a blank black screen with a solid not blinking underscore as opposed to a blinking vertical cursor. I have been thrilled with my laptop since installing an SSD for the OS disk last year. It has been booting fully into Win10 in one minute or less.

For full disclosure this machine is officially 10 years old as of this year (I found my purchase receipts confirming purchase was 2011) but not really because I have over the 10 years upgraded things.

My General Laptop Specs
HP Pavilion DV7-32bUS
Intel Core i7 running at 2.20 GHz
16GB RAM
2 physical drives
OS Disk = 1TB Samsung 860 EVO SSD
Data Disk = 1TB HGST Travelstar 5K1000 HTS541010A9E680 (0J22413) 1TB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 2.5" Internal Notebook Hard Drive
OS = Windows 10 Pro

I am attaching the full export from my sysinfo.

I keep the machine up to date on all Windows Updates and virus and malware is Malware Bytes and I keep it up to date also.

If you need me to provide any other specific details please advise me what will help track this anomaly down and fix it.


Thank you.

Sincerely,

Wonder Woman
 

Attachments

  • HP DV7 Sys Info Specs.txt
    1.4 MB · Views: 11
You have a great deal of programs opening at startup, some of them have some pretty hefty databases to load. SSD or not your C drive is the bottleneck. Nothing wrong with the system you just have too much crap loading at startup.
 
Thank you for your prompt reply. I try to run a clean start up I will take a look at it again. Is there anything that you noticed that would need to run prior to windows loading?
 
Tell you what, rather than me do your homework for you and if you want your system to cold boot faster and stay that way, do this:
Get CCleaner either free edition or get a copy from PortableApps dot com. Go to tools -> startup and you will see a list of everything that loads from a cold boot.
Go ahead and disable everything except what is essential for startup. You have a ton of unneeded stuff that you don't need to start and I doubt you need all those programs resident all the time in your system. Keep in mind a program like Outlook's data file (*.pst file) can get huge if you don't keep it tidy, that is delete crap you no longer need. Big *.pst files can take a while to load and suspends most normal activities until loaded. Most security programs can require big data bases to function as well.
That should speed things up considerably and if you must keep re-enabling programs at startup until things slow down to an unacceptable level.
 
Last edited:
Hello,


I am a help desk tech with 25 yrs experience so pretty skilled I would say. I am having a sudden issue with my personal laptop. It has recently as in within the past week started taking an unusually long time to get Windows to start from a cold boot. I wind up sitting for approximately 3-5 minutes with just a blank black screen with a solid not blinking underscore as opposed to a blinking vertical cursor. I have been thrilled with my laptop since installing an SSD for the OS disk last year. It has been booting fully into Win10 in one minute or less.

For full disclosure this machine is officially 10 years old as of this year (I found my purchase receipts confirming purchase was 2011) but not really because I have over the 10 years upgraded things.

My General Laptop Specs
HP Pavilion DV7-32bUS
Intel Core i7 running at 2.20 GHz
16GB RAM
2 physical drives
OS Disk = 1TB Samsung 860 EVO SSD
Data Disk = 1TB HGST Travelstar 5K1000 HTS541010A9E680 (0J22413) 1TB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 2.5" Internal Notebook Hard Drive
OS = Windows 10 Pro

I am attaching the full export from my sysinfo.

I keep the machine up to date on all Windows Updates and virus and malware is Malware Bytes and I keep it up to date also.

If you need me to provide any other specific details please advise me what will help track this anomaly down and fix it.


Thank you.

Sincerely,

Wonder Woman
I disagree with the other posters. I have been doing the computer tech thing for decades. As you say, your startup is fairly clean. One: NEVER use ccleaner to clean your registry. Completely unnecessary and well known over hundreds and hundreds of PCs I have repaired to actually remove perfectly good lines of code. But that is not responsible for your slow startup. For one thing, this is happening to you before any Windows programs load.

Two: large files have absolutely no effect on startup times unless you are almost out of disk space. 10Gigs is known cutoff point for space. Around that level, Windows doesn't have enough temp disk space to do anything. But that is also not your problem.

The best guess, having dealt with it myself, even on my own PC, is that the BIOS is looking for hardware that is installed but not working, or installed and removed and the BIOS still thinks it's there. All that wait time is the BIOS trying to find and load that hardware. Reinstalling Windows rarely helps unless you also update the chip drivers and/or the BIOS.

Unplug everything except your keyboard. Open your case and unplug the cables to the DVD if you have one. Unplug all mobo devices and reattach. If that fails, try updating the BIOS. And update the CPU software with the mobo manufacturer's or PC manufacturer's original drivers or newest drivers if they have them.

I would be happy to hear you report back. ... Mike
 
I disagree with the other posters. I have been doing the computer tech thing for decades. As you say, your startup is fairly clean. One: NEVER use ccleaner to clean your registry. Completely unnecessary and well known over hundreds and hundreds of PCs I have repaired to actually remove perfectly good lines of code. But that is not responsible for your slow startup. For one thing, this is happening to you before any Windows programs load.

Two: large files have absolutely no effect on startup times unless you are almost out of disk space. 10Gigs is known cutoff point for space. Around that level, Windows doesn't have enough temp disk space to do anything. But that is also not your problem.

The best guess, having dealt with it myself, even on my own PC, is that the BIOS is looking for hardware that is installed but not working, or installed and removed and the BIOS still thinks it's there. All that wait time is the BIOS trying to find and load that hardware. Reinstalling Windows rarely helps unless you also update the chip drivers and/or the BIOS.

Unplug everything except your keyboard. Open your case and unplug the cables to the DVD if you have one. Unplug all mobo devices and reattach. If that fails, try updating the BIOS. And update the CPU software with the mobo manufacturer's or PC manufacturer's original drivers or newest drivers if they have them.

I would be happy to hear you report back. ... Mike
No offense Mike I have been in IT since Win 95 days. Did you bother to read the file they attached? BIOS don't suddenly go South unless hardware or BIOS settings have been altered. In rare instances I have seen systems dwell on attached USB storage looking for boot up info. I didn't see that in the start up sequences in the uploaded specs. Perhaps I missed that in the upload if you would care to point that out. Typically some of the programs that are loading at startup on this system are all vying to load their disk based data bases and the uploaded specs reflect that. I see that all the time and it does affect boot times, sometimes severely.
 
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