Desktop about 10x slower to boot up than laptop

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I have a desktop and laptop with fresh installs of windows 8. The desktop boots much slower(and possibly slower in general). The laptop boots up in about 10 seconds to win8 desktop(the post process is also much faster). The desktop takes about a minute or so to boot up.

Here are some screen shots of CPU-Z. The desktop should be much more powerful. The only problem is the desktop uses HD's that run at 5200 RPM's while the laptop runs at 7200. Otherwise the desktop is better in every spec as far as I can tell. They run the exact same OS with the exact same setup(Fresh, no apps installed).

Any ideas why the desktop is so slow or potentially how to diagnose it?

Desktop

Laptop

Archival

Posted 2013-03-19T00:44:16.263

Reputation: 225

Question was closed 2013-03-19T17:06:28.743

4Bootup times are nearly entirely dependent on the speed of the hard-drive. Not sequential speeds, random-access speeds. If it is truly a fresh install on both machines, it is probably the hard-drive in the Desktop machine that is slowing it down. – Rain – 2013-03-19T00:51:49.110

@Rain: True or not surely it wouldn't explain an order of magnitude slow down. 5200rpm can be at most about 40% slower. – Archival – 2013-03-19T02:41:53.560

Random access times make-or-break a system's boot-up time. Run a tool like ATTO Disk Benchmark on both the laptop and the desktop. Compare the smaller transfer sizes of each drive.

Also, time the boot from end end of the BIOS POST to when Windows finally loads; comparing boot times and including the time it takes for the BIOS of each machine to POST renders the results very inaccurate. Desktop BIOSes usually have "more to do" than laptop BIOSes – Rain – 2013-03-19T03:50:57.317

use xbootmgr from the Windows Performance Toolkit and trace why Windows 8 boots slowly.

– magicandre1981 – 2013-03-19T05:37:52.217

Answers

1

I think you answered your own question. The Desktop can only load at about 75% (theoretical based of spindle speed) as the laptop. The OS must be loaded from Disk, to RAM and CPU, that really makes a difference and that is why I only use 7,200RPM or faster drives in my desktops and laptops (Or SSD).

Another thought, you mention the POST being faster, does the laptop support UEFI, is it enabled? Windows 8 can do all sorts of power-down hibernate-like witch craft that the laptop might be able to take advantage of if it has UEFI and the desktop does not.

Austin T French

Posted 2013-03-19T00:44:16.263

Reputation: 9 766

I wouldn't imagine it would make that big of a difference! Given that the desktop is much faster than the laptop in every other regard I and surely a 7200rpm drive can at most be approximately 40% faster I would expect at most around a 20-30 second boot time and not a min and a half or so. Another possibility I just thought of is the desktop drive is about 3 times as large and this could slow down the load times even further... still seems that it should be faster though. With your logic I should expect that win8 should boot in about 2-3 seconds with a 10k rpm drive/SSD? – Archival – 2013-03-19T02:39:57.213

In fact, looking at http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/hdd-charts-2012/-01-Read-Throughput-Average-h2benchw-3.16,2901.html there are some 5400rpm drives that beat the snot out of 7200rpm drives. It is possible my drives really suck in the desktop and the laptop is much better. I didn't notice a huge throughput between the two though(maybe 50 mb/s vs 70 mb/s. Again, nothing that would explain a 10x boot slowdown. – Archival – 2013-03-19T02:46:58.200

75% as fast as in 5.4k / 7.2k. And there is certainly more to it. Larger is generally faster if the drives are similar, a higher platter density improves performance. Answer edited too, for another idea – Austin T French – 2013-03-19T02:54:31.670

I do not know if the laptop supports UEFI and I am not hibernating with win8. When I do sleep it takes about 2 seconds to boot up on the laptop.... which is very nice. I've never used those features on the desktop because they've never been worth the trouble(slow and causes problems with apps). It would be nice to be able to determine the performance issue. Is there any way to monitor hard drive performance through the boot process? – Archival – 2013-03-19T03:15:07.500

UEFI and Windows 8 means the computer never turns off like it did in XP / 7, MS reworked the process and even a shutdown is more like a Win 7 Hibernate. And Boot / loadup loads the OS first, there is no great way to monitor the process because it would come late in the process – Austin T French – 2013-03-19T03:44:43.740

Asked: 2013-03-19T00:44:16.263

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Active: 2013-03-19T02:56:07.037