I think the Startup Processes really gets abused and people default to blame Windows for it. My time to a usable desktop seemed slow until I removed Teams, Steam, Dropbox and some other update utilities from Startup. Now it's pretty much instant.

I keep mine startup fairly clean and this is key to a 'fast startup'. There are about 10 different ways applications can auto start in windows and you have too check them all, as all will be used. My laptop from 2012 is 10-30 seconds. My laptop from last year is usually under 10. My NUC from 2011 is about 30 seconds and has been consistently that for the time I have owned it. Also on older computers check to see if it is thermal throttling. As the fans/paste can stop being effective and just need to be cleaned up after some time.

My parents bought this rubish computer about 3 years ago it is easily 3-5 mins to startup. Which is due to a lack of RAM (3GB, which should be plenty) and windows swapping to startup. Plus a bunch of startup apps they 'just can not live without'. I remove them, and get 'wow the computer is so much faster'. Few months later and some update to that 'must have' app will put itself back into the startup (sigh).

Amusingly, Microsoft provides their own tool (1) for excellent insight and enabling/disabling of all the various places applications can put their startup executables.

1 - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/auto...

I had totally forgot about that util! Thank you for reminding me! The sysinternal tools are great. They should just bake them into the OS.

I've been using hibernate for years now. I start my computer once per month. I really wouldn't care if it takes 5 minutes.

I'm not sure why that isn't shown by default anymore. But you can still add it to the menu and map it to the power button.

It isn't shown because on 10 "power off" is a lightly-tweaked hibernate.

Not at all.

Power off closes all your apps, hibernate doesn't.

I'm generally using 15 or 20 apps. I only have to open those once a month after updates.

If someone uses power off, they have to open them daily (I know, because I have other computers in my house configured like that).

True, it's not quite identical, but I expect that's why hibernate isn't on the menu by default (b/c power off was close enough in MS's opinion).

Yes. All of those. I also disable the various iTunes and Creative Cloud 'helpers'

If you think it's fast now, just wait til you remove Windows!

Sometimes it isn't all that simple.

My work laptop runs W10. At some point in the last 3 months or so, an update came in and fucked up Windows Explorer. About 5 times in a work day I need to use Task Manager to reboot Windows Explorer because the following things stop working:

- Cannot type into the start menu (the entire menu goes black. If I backspace anything I typed -despite not being able to see it- it will work again) - I can do this once, and then typing doesn't work at all.

- Taskbar will not hide behind full screen apps, clicking on icons will not bring the app to the forefront, I need to minimize all screens in front of it until I can find it

- Cannot view/change my wifi. The list just sits there blank, refreshing infinitely.

Likely unrelated, but at the same time, Windows randomly stops being able to reach by Default Gateway. I can disable/re-enable wifi and it works, but it tends to happen over and over until i reboot once it starts happening. Usually good for a couple days after a reboot.

Lastly, on shutdown, the computer will bluescreen if I have had my external SSD plugged in at any point.

I haven't tweaked anything Windows Related anywhere. The only excuse I can come up with is one of the dozens of apps I use for my job conflicts with Windows somewhere. There's no useful log info during/after the points of issue. There's nothing in the scans for `sfc`, nothing comes up in the system troubleshooters. At this point I'm looking at doing a full re-install of Windows, but I have so much stuff to move across that I'm mostly dreading it.

My personal computer runs fine though...

Interesting! On my computer:

- Applications do not gain focus. When a new application is launched, it starts at the bottom of the window stack. I can't even alt-tab to it easily because it's all the way at the end of the list.

- Start menu is a crapshoot. Sometimes it doesn't open when I press the start key (but always when I click).

- Once Start (eventually) opens, Search is a crapshoot. I'm not even talking about documents (although I'm usually better off using git-bash's `find` command despite the search indexer regularly using 30% of my CPU) -- I mean I can't even type half the time. Of which half of that time, the start menu turns white (but only most parts of it?).

So my workflow for using the Start menu is, I often have to mash the Start key 5 or so times just to start typing.

What do I use it for? Mostly launching programs. Eg. last night, I typed Half Life 2. When I type the first few letters of "Half", the correct result shows up. But if I type "Half Life" it goes away because I didn't use a hyphen (seriously).

- Explorer has 2-3 second lags. I don't just mean opening it, I mean every damn operation. The funniest part is, if you have Sublime text open at the same time, you can see that the changes to a folder actually take place INSTANTLY (and Sublime detects and displays them within a few milliseconds of your action in another program) but Explorer, in which you did the action will take another 2-3 seconds to display its own changes. (?????!!!)

If it did all of this on day one I probably would have thrown my computer down a long staircase, but it's been such a gradual deterioration that this is just my life now.

If it's on a work laptop, it could be IT shenanigans.

Well you do have a beefy workstation with a fast drive, most people on windows are running some anemic laptop or the cheapest dell desktop their employer is able to order by the pallet.

How often do you use Linux to actually have a comparison? I have yet to see a Windows 10 pc that does not feel sluggish for me, even a fresh install has random waiting times I am simply not used to.

In my experience it depends on drivers. I bought a PC, I think it was 2017 too. Nvidia drivers were unstable and I was getting BSoD every few days. But at some point they fixed it. It was quite stable since then, no issues either.

That said, I'm trying to be careful to my Windows setup, avoiding installing anything that could tinker with kernel or deep OS integration. Basically it's clean Windows with simple software, no antiviruses, firewalls, registry cleaners, etc. May be it's getting slower with time, but it's barely noticeable.

I have an i5-3300 from 2012, 32 GB RAM, and a SSD. There are no performance issues to speak of. I have a Ryzen 3 3250U from 2020, 8 GB RAM, and NVME storage. The performance under Windows is lackluster, while there are no performance issues under Linux. I'm not sure what the problem is since the software configuration on both machines is quite similar and the performance issues still manifest themselves when there is free memory (i.e. the most obvious difference).

I think people just don't know how to be good computer users.. they might be able to program their way out of a paper bag but systems admin is not their paper bag

yes, if only people would get good, perhaps their OS would speed up.

In part, the way the author does. Turning off sensible default like fast booting and layering on complexity for the sake of complexity like Hyper-V.

The desire to criticize Windows also helps…I mean the boot time for my iPhone is much much worse than anything the author measured. My upgrade times are probably at least as bad,too. And Siri search requires an internet connect.

The first time I installed Windows 7 on an SSD it started in less than a second.

Less than 1s boot time. To desktop.

I find that hard to believe, but back when Windows 8 was new (not that I'd heard of it), I think I would've believed it. You enabled auto-login.

Great question. I'm wondering the same thing. I also built a PC in 2017 and installed Windows 10 on it. It initially had a 7s boot time following bios startup. Several updates later, the boot time is now close to a minute and app startup times are noticeably slower as well. I've always been very careful about what software I install on it. I've done all of the standard troubleshooting, but so far it hasn't gotten bad enough to warrant a fresh install.

Task Manager → "Start up" tab

Disable everything and see if it boots faster.

Thanks, that was the first thing I tried. I didn't want to go into great detail about my troubleshooting efforts because I don't think it's quite relevant to the overall discussion.

To add further, those more adventurous can also use Sysinternals free Autoruns utility to find out everything that could start.

Handy hint, it has an option to hide all the default Microsoft stuff so you just see third party.