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!