How long should a Windows10 laptop take to start up?
 

As per the title, how long does it typically take?
My flatmate has a reasonably new, decent spec machine and last night it took 9 minutes! Can that be right?!
My ancient XP laptop boots up in under 2 minutes by comparison. I'm really not looking forward to the day I have to replace it...


Thanks

Michael

25 seconds for mine. Less from the BIOS screen. However, this is with not much being installed just yet.

My little 11" netbook has W10 and a SSHD. It's usually ready for use within about twenty seconds.

That time stated is excessive. It's possible that W10 may be doing an update in the background, or re-configuring after the previous one. Also possible that another background program may be updating. It may therefore be a one off. If this is the time taken for every boot-up, the machine is diseased, and needs to be taken to a doctor.

Yesterday afternoon I was at an church event where hymns from a W10 driven computer were to be projected onto the screen. However it announced that it was "Upgrading - Do not turn off your Computer" and after somewhere between five and ten minutes had passed it was still stuck on the turning worm with only 7% completed. The time to start the show had arrived; the screen was shut down and the hymn books were brought out! One would possibly be a little disappointed if this happened at the start of a major PP presentation in a business conference.

Even God has to wait for Windows...

Perhaps in the God-shop you need WindowsSG?

Stained glass....;)

Sounds like the recent hefty update was being installed

If it's not an update (sounds like it though) then check the RAM hasn't come loose, had a desktop once which had a large stick and a small one, the large one was loose so it tried to boot just from the small one, which was about ten times too small. Boot time, over 30minutes. Once memory checked and re-fixed, 2 minutes.

Start times
 

2012 Toshiba Core i5 6 Gb RAM, Windows 8.1, Satellite laptop start-up times:


Dead cold, full boot, 30 secs.


On from stand-by, 15 secs.


(I have no apps that open upon start-up)

Good job cars (for example) don't behave this way!

Thanks for the replies. My friends lappy always takes ages to start up, so he's going to get it checked out...

Visiting family who have no internet connection. Spent 40 mins in Sainsbury's café with my Surface waiting for it to start and stop telling me that 100% of updates were complete but not to turn my computer off.

My desktop had the hefty update a few days earlier and I started up my Surface at that time in the hope of their both updating at the same time knowing that I would be 'good to go' when I hit the UK running. No such luck. Getting rather fed-up to say the least.

Expatrick's church associate maybe needs to be reminded of the parable of the unready virgins. One is feeling rather smug: like Alsacienne, one realised that an update was due, so left the lappy on wasting amps on Wed or Thurs. Update duly happened... and my lot didn't have to wait for their hymns on Sunday.
Don't tell me how much you all love a smartarse: I know.


And btw, my fairly loaded but now rather old Win 10 T61 Lenovo takes a couple of minutes to load and stabilise. About the same as the Win 7 one, come to think of it.

The best thing you can do is to replace the hard drive with an SSD version, it will be reborn, everything will run faster and you can clone the contents straight across from your current hard drive.

Boot time
 

Dell 5550 Lappie: I7-4500U 2.4 GHz (When pushed) 12 Gb of 800Mhz DDR3 RAM 1TB 5400 RPM HDD WDC WD10

Win 8.1 patched and up to date.- boot time to fully functional (with Norton) one minute 5 Seconds. (On battery) from pressing the power switch and entering password. 45 Seconds with mains plugged in.

Battery usage Max miser Mode (10 hours usage Extended battery life enabled)

This unit really needs a SSD to shine.

Even with an SSD I find the newer (post XP) versions of Windows can be REALLY slow to start sometimes. I've always found that the really long delays are when it's downloading massive updates, and it seems to do this pretty often. It's done it twice to me this week, each time forcing me to stop work and reboot, something I find really annoying.

I know it's for my own good, but why cant Windows do it's update stuff quietly in the background, without interrupting what you're working on? My Linux machines do this. Not once have any of them ever slowed down or stopped me doing stuff by demanding a re-boot, just because they've updated something. They also all start up in a few seconds, often quicker than the monitor can display it's splash screen.

We had something similar at work a few weeks ago. Boss plugged laptop into projector to go through list of open bugs, turned it on.... and Windows was installing updates for ten minutes. Fortunately we had other things we could talk about, but there's a reason most of our systems run Linux.

The same happened to me at work a few times, and it seems to be a very common issue that winds up a fair few Windows users, so why can't Microsoft fix it?

The advice at work was to turn off automatic updates whenever you were bothered by it, but that then resulted in people forgetting to turn updates back on again (me included). Now I'm retired I only have one Windows machine, needed to run AutoCad, but that one machine causes me more frustration than the three Linux machines, my Android tablet and my wife's iPad all put together.

Surely there has to be a way for Microsoft to make Windows just update in the background, without interfering with what you're working on or needing you to stop work altogether and reboot the machine? If Linux can do it in the background, with no impact at all on the user, and has been able to for as long as I've been using it (around 3 years now) then there has to be a way for Microsoft to do the same.

Apart from the privacy issues surrounding Windows 10 (and updated versions of 7 and 8), the update nuisance is probably one of the main reasons I'm not going to get another Windows machine again. I doubt that I'm alone, either, as it seems that more and more people are getting a bit fed up with Microsoft. It's a shame, as I think that they have produced some excellent software in the past.

Windows has a fundamental design flaw in that DLLs generally can't be updated while they're in use. In Linux, you can overwrite the 'DLL' with a new file and no-one cares (though programs that were started up with the old DLL will continue using it until they're shut down), but Windows has to reboot to replace them.

The other thing is that Windows lets you roll back an update that fails, so it has to make backups before each update install. Linux just overwrites the files, and you're on your own if it fails. That's one reason Windows updates take much longer.

Well they're certainly doing just that in a futile attempt to get my Win 7 desktop to update to 10. I didn't request it, I haven't allowed it,I don't want it but it still tries. (I have a fix to stop it actually happening but it still tries.) So, yes, it seems to be possible.