Windows 10 i5 machine, dirty upgrade from Windows 8, all legalcopies, takes forever to startup

I've seen threads on this. It's apparently a software problem with some (one or more) driver. Anyway, it's not my HD (I did scan check, long version, and it's fine).

Annoying. Sometimes you get the "rotating circle wait icon" for ten minutes before you finally get the log-in screen. Legal copies of everything.

CD-ROM device stopped working, but that should not be creating a problem.

And sometimes the bootup is fast, which means unless it's an intermittent hardware problem, then h/w is not the problem.

This happens IMO with "dirty" upgrades which is the default for upgrade to Windows 10 from 8. There was a way to do a clean reinstall but it was too complicated to bother with.

RL

RayLopez99 wrote:
I've seen threads on this. It's apparently a software problem with some (one or more) driver. Anyway, it's not my HD (I did scan check, long version, and it's fine).

Annoying. Sometimes you get the "rotating circle wait icon" for ten minutes before you finally get the log-in screen. Legal copies of everything.

CD-ROM device stopped working, but that should not be creating a problem.

And sometimes the bootup is fast, which means unless it's an intermittent hardware problem, then h/w is not the problem.

This happens IMO with "dirty" upgrades which is the default for upgrade to Windows 10 from 8. There was a way to do a clean reinstall but it was too complicated to bother with.

RL

Once you've installed it on your computer one time,
that generates a Digital Entitlement key on the
Microsoft activation server.

If you do a clean install, to a blank hard drive,
it should activate immediately. It does this by
computing a hardware hash during installation, from
which it will conclude you were already running a copy
of it, and this is the same copy.

Boot time varies, depending on whether there is an
opportunity for kernel hibernation or not. To make
the boot times *uniformly slow*, right click Start,
select the Administrator Command Prompt window and do

powercfg -h off

That will disable hibernation, which covers both
session hibernation, but also covers kernel hibernation.

Kernel hibernation, means the OS doesn't have to load the
OS at startup. It loads a hiberfile with just the kernel
in it. This allows a faster start.

At startup, it's possible you will see Windows Defender
scanning the system32 directory. If your hard drive is a
slow one, the act of scanning a lot of small files could
make it slow.

If changes come into the OS, requiring a reboot, and in
addition, a reboot of the kernel, then the hibernated image
of the kernel cannot be used. So that would account for
instances where the faster kernel start is not possible.

*******

This doesn't necessarily have anything to do with whether
it was an Upgrade install or a Clean install. If your drive
is slow, you would expect the startup to be a bit slow.

In your missive, you should have indicated the CPU speed and
RAM available, as indicators of what to expect. For example,
a very late model single-core P4, would run like a slug,
simply because multiple threads of execution would be
running on the one core. The OS likes to do many things
at the same time, and on a single core, this can extend the
boot time. I haven't tried Win10 on the laptop, but really,
I wouldn't even bother. As even Windows 7 is a bit slow to
start. Upgrading to 10 wouldn't be a very worthwhile experiment
on that machine, as it's already slow (single core but 3GB
of RAM, so at least there's enough RAM for comfort).

The OS can easily run in 1GB of RAM. The core OS needs around
350MB (when under memory pressure), leaving 650MB for
something else.

*******

So if you want to, you can do a clean install, and I wouldn't
expect the behavior (slow start if not using hibernated
kernel) to still be an issue. And you will be able to tell
the kernel is hibernated, because you will lose multi-boot
capability. If you had two Windows say, on the same hard
drive, and booted Win10, and the kernel hibernated, then
it would start in Win10 the next time. You'd need to to
a "full shutdown" in order to have a boot menu selection
opportunity after a reboot.

I run my OSes with powercfg -h off, for two reasons. It
removes the hiberfile (a waste of space), but it also prevents
kernel hibernation on Win10. My startup times are consistent
as a result.

I keep my OS partition contents "small", to allow any OS
here, the C: partition, to be backed up in under ten minutes.
Throwing in a huge hiberfile, might not necessarily help with
that aspect of maintenance (making my backup times short).

And I wouldn't have Win10 as my "daily" or "only OS". I keep
it on a short leash, unplugging the network interface when
I want to use it uninterrupted. So if someone has a question,
I want to quickly run the OS without doing Windows Update,
downloading Windows Defender updates, I just disconnect the
network cable. The only time the network cable is connected
when Win10 is booted, is when I'm giving the computer a
"four hour maintenance window", to update itself. And then,
back off the network it goes. Before a maintenance window,
I do a backup of C: using Macrium Reflect Free.

Paul

On Monday, February 29, 2016 at 5:05:51 PM UTC+8, Paul wrote:
,
back off the network it goes. Before a maintenance window,
I do a backup of C: using Macrium Reflect Free.

Paul

Thanks. It's a i5, as the title said, fairly new mechanical HDs, 4 GB RAM. I did turn off "Fast Bootup" (forget how, but it's a checkbox). If you don't do that, the PC would actually hibernate and not shut down when you shutdown (strange but true). I figured this out by noticing the uptime in Performance Monitor was "weeks" instead of hours. Annoying that they don't tell you this stuff.

I did not know that the hash is stored on MSFT servers.

I think it's a s/w bug not a feature, the slow bootup. I just have to live with it.

RL

RayLopez99 wrote:
On Monday, February 29, 2016 at 5:05:51 PM UTC+8, Paul wrote:
,
back off the network it goes. Before a maintenance window,
I do a backup of C: using Macrium Reflect Free.

Paul

Thanks. It's a i5, as the title said, fairly new mechanical HDs, 4 GB RAM. I did turn off "Fast Bootup" (forget how, but it's a checkbox). If you don't do that, the PC would actually hibernate and not shut down when you shutdown (strange but true). I figured this out by noticing the uptime in Performance Monitor was "weeks" instead of hours. Annoying that they don't tell you this stuff.

I did not know that the hash is stored on MSFT servers.

I think it's a s/w bug not a feature, the slow bootup. I just have to live with it.

RL

There is Windows Performance Analyzer. That's a kit which
records ETW events. The OS has logging at a low level,
which runs early in boot, all the way to shutdown.
Sysinternals Process Monitor was a client of ETW
events, and it's an example of something that records
them. But the Windows Performance Analyzer does something
similar, only you can use it for testing boot times.

When it collects a trace, the trace can be 300-900MB or so.
And after a trace is collected, you can view the results
in a series of standard graphs.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/jeff_stok...xperfview.aspx

Previous to that, there were tools like xperf.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ntdebugging/...kit-xperf.aspx

I tried using that stuff in Windows 8 timeframe.

xperf 6.2.9200.16834 (v.5.x) Windows 8 SDK RTM and Windows 8 ADK RTM.

xbootmgr -trace boot -traceFlags BASE+CSWITCH+DRIVERS+POWER -resultPath C:\TEMP

No drivers

xbootmgr -trace boot -traceFlags BASE+CSWITCH+POWER -resultPath C:\TEMP

And then I think you run xperfview? later to graph things.

The Windows Performance Analyzer does a lot of unnecessary analysis.
Like some performance runs that have nothing to do with the
boot you wanted to study.

In any case, there's a ton of stuff that taps into ETW, if you
want to graph what is running and slowing down boot. It just
takes some time and effort to find the right web recipe to get
the answer as quickly as possible.

*******

Back in WinXP era, there was BootVis, which does the same sort
of thing, only it isn't over-engineered like the above stuff.
"It just works." Unfortunately, BootVis went out of support, and
in a test of that one, I found it still worked in WinXP SP3, even
though support for it stopped before SP3.

Paul

RayLopez99 wrote:
On Monday, February 29, 2016 at 5:05:51 PM UTC+8, Paul wrote:
,
back off the network it goes. Before a maintenance window,
I do a backup of C: using Macrium Reflect Free.

Paul

Thanks. It's a i5, as the title said, fairly new mechanical HDs, 4 GB RAM. I did turn off "Fast Bootup" (forget how, but it's a checkbox). If you don't do that, the PC would actually hibernate and not shut down when you shutdown (strange but true). I figured this out by noticing the uptime in Performance Monitor was "weeks" instead of hours. Annoying that they don't tell you this stuff.

I did not know that the hash is stored on MSFT servers.

I think it's a s/w bug not a feature, the slow bootup. I just have to live with it.

RL

Here's a couple of 70MB videos of WPA stuff.

These hadn't stopped downloading, as I was writing
my previous post, and I forgot about them.

WPA Basics
https://videocontent.osi.office.net/...ch2_96kbps.mp4

WPA Presets, Profiles, and Sessions
https://videocontent.osi.office.net/...ch2_96kbps.mp4

Paul