booting windows 10 spends too long

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In august 2015, I have upgrade my laptop from windows 8.1 to windows 10. But it spends always 10 minutes to boot it. It is not normal that it spends so long. What can I do for boot him faster? Below some information about my laptop.

  • age: +/- 2 year (on august 2015)
  • edition: Windows 10 Home

File trace are removed.

Update:

  • I must also say that always there comes a windows update, I have the same problem again form slow booting. Is it good that I turn off the updates? If yes, how can I do that?
  • Also it is in periods that my pc booting to slow. Some time it is like normal (a few seconds) and other times a few minutes. I don't know how it comes that it is fast or slow.

boot trace

H. Pauwelyn

Posted 2015-09-07T16:04:25.503

Reputation: 638

use the Win10 SDK/WPT (https://dev.windows.com/en-us/downloads/windows-10-sdk) and run this command to do a boot trace: http://pastebin.com/CYGqRZXE and share the compressed file.

– magicandre1981 – 2015-09-07T16:17:12.020

have you captured the boot trace? – magicandre1981 – 2015-09-11T04:27:11.897

In my pastebin link I posted the steps. – magicandre1981 – 2015-09-11T15:42:24.060

@magicandre1981: I have uploaded a boot trace. Can you inspect it please? – H. Pauwelyn – 2015-09-22T13:11:31.743

ok, I posted what I see from the trace. – magicandre1981 – 2015-09-22T16:00:52.687

Some have said check if the SATA Mode is set to AHCI instead of IDE. – Noumenon – 2015-10-19T15:59:31.830

If the prefetcher is broken you could try turning on Superfetch in msconfig. – Noumenon – 2015-10-19T16:34:01.010

I thought that it spends +/- 2 year to boot :) – kokbira – 2015-12-17T19:17:14.380

@kokbira: that's impossible long :), no it is the age of my pc. – H. Pauwelyn – 2015-12-18T09:45:46.230

Answers

9

To see why Windows boots slowly you need to install the Windows Performance Toolkit, which is part of the Windows 10 SDK.

enter image description here (all other entries can be unselected)

Run WPRUI.exe, select First Level, CPU Usage, DiskIO, FileIO and under Performance Scenario select Boot. Number of iteration can be set to 1 and click to start.

enter image description here

This reboots Windows and captures all activity during boot. After the reboot let the countdown tick to 0.

Now make a double click on the generated ETL file to open the ETL in Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA.exe), click on Profiles->Apply->Browse Catalog and select the file FullBoot.Boot.wpaprofile you see this overview:

enter image description here

and see that the longest delay happens during the WinlogonInit phase. This takes 197 seconds to finish.

The WinLogonInit subphase begins when SMSSInit completes and starts Winlogon.exe. During WinLogonInit, the user logon screen appears, the service control manager starts services, and Group Policy scripts run. WinLogonInit ends when the Explorer process starts.

Visual Cues WinLogonInit begins shortly before the logon screen appears. It ends just before the desktop appears for the first time.

WinLogonInit Performance Vulnerabilities

Many operations occur in parallel during WinLogonInit. On many systems, this subphase is CPU bound and has large I/O demands. Good citizenship from the services that start in this phase is critical for optimized boot times. Services can declare dependencies or use load order groups to ensure that they start in a specific order. Windows processes load order groups in serial order. Service initialization delays in an early load order group block subsequent load order groups and can possibly block the boot process .

When I look at the disk IO table, I see that the slow Samsung HDD (SAMSUNG Spinpoint M8) is very busy. I can also see that the prefetcher ReadyBoost is not working, it only generates "misses". This causes slowdowns to starting services like the lmhosts which takes 129s to start.

As a workaround you can improve boot performance by running this command:

xbootmgr -trace boot -prepSystem -verboseReadyBoot

this reboots Windows several times, does a defrag and trains the prefetcher again. But to fully speedup boot, replace the 5400rpm HDD with a SSD.

magicandre1981

Posted 2015-09-07T16:04:25.503

Reputation: 86 560

Your solution works very good, but there was a windows update and I have again the same problem again. I have run your command (xbootmgr -trace boot -prepSystem -verboseReadyBoot) in the command line but it didn't help. Can you help me? Later today I go upload a new etl file that you can use. – H. Pauwelyn – 2015-09-28T07:43:45.040

I need the new ETL file to see more details. – magicandre1981 – 2015-09-28T15:52:54.230

Sorry that I have it later than I have said, but the new etl file is uploaded. I have also added some more information about my problem. – H. Pauwelyn – 2015-10-04T08:27:33.337

1same as before. The prefetcher is broken and the HDD is busy all the time. the optimization is only a workaround. Replace the HDD with a faster SSD. – magicandre1981 – 2015-10-04T14:53:05.057

It's still going to take three minutes to boot with an SSD, something still isn't right. – Noumenon – 2015-10-19T11:52:17.493

@Noumenon share a boot trace – magicandre1981 – 2015-10-19T15:52:28.483

I'm not the OP, I'm just saying the normal boot time is under 20 seconds so even if his hardware is 1/3 the speed of an SSD that's not his only problem. – Noumenon – 2015-10-19T15:58:00.057

@Noumenon no, his bottleneck is the disk – magicandre1981 – 2015-10-19T16:01:45.213

1TIL SSDs are 3x as fast only for large sequential access. They're up to 50x as fast for small random access. So I believe you now. – Noumenon – 2015-10-19T16:33:08.410

@magicandre1981: I have executed the command (xbootmgr -trace boot -prepSystem -verboseReadyBoot) but the problem is now every time I startup my PC, the performance analyzer starts also. How can I stop that? For this moment I use every time the task manager for force it to exit, but it is not fine. Please can you help me again? – H. Pauwelyn – 2015-11-01T08:59:45.990

2did Windows finish all 6 steps? if yes, run xbootmgr -remove to stop it – magicandre1981 – 2015-11-01T18:24:12.873

5400rpm drives: I can see the problem. – music2myear – 2016-12-13T17:51:19.453

1ETL? WPA? Please expand your acronyms so that we all may understand your answer. – Lightness Races with Monica – 2017-04-25T00:58:26.187

@BoundaryImposition WPA.exe = Windows Performace Analyzer. ETL = Event Tracing for Windows Logfile – magicandre1981 – 2017-04-25T04:19:53.117

1@magicandre1981: I mean, in the answer. – Lightness Races with Monica – 2017-04-25T09:01:00.000

@BoundaryImposition when you follow the steps from my comment you get a ETL file after Windows is booted. Here double click on the generated ETL file and open it in WPA.exe. Now you see the GUI and can apply the profile to see the same graphs like in the pictures.

– magicandre1981 – 2017-04-25T15:44:48.483

Yes, @magicandre1981, I am asking you to incorporate this information into your answer. Comments are transient. – Lightness Races with Monica – 2017-04-25T18:33:11.093

I added it and with the newer way via GUI, so it is easier for beginners like you. – magicandre1981 – 2017-04-26T15:04:05.317

@magicandre1981 the info about "xbootmgr -remove" should go into the answer, it is important... – FarO – 2017-05-10T16:14:07.820

@OlafM this is normally not required. This is only needed if you got an error and want to interrupt the tracing. – magicandre1981 – 2017-05-11T16:15:16.813