Slow booting time in Windows 8.1

Question

From some days to now my Windows 8.1 PC boots slowly.

The delay occurs between the login screen and the appearance of the desk screen. Between them the screen turns black and only the cursor and, eventually, the spinner are shown. This state can last between 30 seconds to 2 minutes or more, and then the desk appears, and the PC begins to run fine as always.

I have run various antivirus and antispyware programs, checking and defragmenting my HD, but without results.

When the problem begun I didn't have done any modification in my hardware of software; I didn't install any program.

What could be the cause and the solution to this problem?

Answer 1

Ive had these problems in the past, but there are a lot of things you can do to greatly improve the boot performance. Be glad you have win8.1, because win10 is a nightmare to fix boot problems.

First, uninstall programs and apps you don't need. then delete all temporary files. use TFC by oldtimer or another temp file cleaner.

Next, defrag. don't use the built in windows defrag, cause it stinks and its slower than congress. I like to use auslogics disk defrag. its free, fast, and it has optimize features, and can move your boot files to fast areas of your disk based on the prefetch layout. these settings aren't enabled by default, so you have to enable them manually, but then run a good defrag and optimize, or run several in succession.

Next, shortstroke your hard drive. shrink the system partition to about a fourth of your hdd size. or as small as it will let you. make sure to move your big data files to another partition.

next, compress hyberfil.sys by opening an elevated cmd prompt and type this:

POWERCFG -H SIZE 50

this changes the compression ratio of the hibernation file to allow a quicker read time, improving the fast boot feature of win8.1

then disable these services:

SuperFetch

Background intelligent Transfer Service

Windows Search

these services hog your disk at boot

then, use regedit to disable superfetcher in the registry

navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

set EnableSuperfetcher key to 0

reboot

hope this helps

Answer 2

Finally, I solved the problem. It's related to Avast antivirus. Uninstalling it solved the problem. Afterwards I reinstalled Avast (perhaps a newest version), but the problem didn't appear again.