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lmacmil
join:2001-01-26
South Bend, IN

lmacmil

Member

[WIN8] I thought Windows 8 was supposed to boot faster

I had bought the upgrade over a year ago and finally installed it until yesterday. The main reason I did so was that I had (or thought I had) read that Win8 booted much faster than previous versions (I was running Win7.) The upgrade to 8.0 took about 3 hours, included downloading and installed the 100 updates that were available. Once the updates were installed, the update to 8.1 became available and I installed that. Took another 3 hours (I have a 5 year old PC with an Athlon 4850e CPU and IDE drives.)

It seemed to be running fine today but I accidentally hit shutdown instead of sleep last time I was done for a while. Whereas it took about 3-4 minutes to fully boot up under Win7, I swear it was 7 or 8 minutes before Win 8 finished. And the first time, it shut down before fully booting, which is disconcerting.

So did I remember incorrectly about Win 8 booting faster or is it just because of my ancient hardware?
BlitzenZeus
Burnt Out Cynic
Premium Member
join:2000-01-13

1 edit

BlitzenZeus

Premium Member

Even my core 2 system didn't take anywhere that long to load without fast startup enabled running the Win 8 preview. Let me guess... A load of 3rd party crap running on startup, and a 5400 rpm hdd? Do you have at least 2GB of memory? I'd have to look up the fsb, but that processor probably isn't that slow. So it's your hardware, and/or the 3rd crap you have running on your system unless you have a failing hdd, otherwise are low on memory forcing constant pagefile usage.

Edit: I'm not one to say defragging all the time is necessary, but you just installed a new operating system so it might not of had time to do this yet. Win 7 also had an automatic defrag, and optimization if you left it alone long enough to complete, otherwise ran it manually.
lmacmil
join:2001-01-26
South Bend, IN

lmacmil

Member

The processor is a dual-core running 2.5Ghz and I have 4GB. Pretty sure my HDD is 7200 rpm. I probably should clean out the crap I've accumulated over the years though. I checked and fast startup is already enabled. I checked the virtual memory settings and notice I had manually set the page file size in the past so I changed that to let Windows determine the size. Maybe that will help.
BlitzenZeus
Burnt Out Cynic
Premium Member
join:2000-01-13

BlitzenZeus

Premium Member

In my latest build which is far faster, but still uses a 7200 hdd boots Win 8.1 to a usable desktop in around twenty seconds without fast startup enabled, and with fast startup enabled it's around ten seconds to a usable desktop, however it is an sata drive, not an ide drive which might provide more caching. So a 7200 hdd is capable of booting quickly with Win 8 even with fast startup disabled, but other factors come into play.
Mele20
Premium Member
join:2001-06-05
Hilo, HI

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Click for full size
Microsoft is ONLY referring to boot time to login in regards to Windows 8 fast boot.

Use Bootracer to show you boot time both to login and to full desktop. It's a neat tool and keeps a good record of your boots and the times so you can quickly see if some program you recently added that starts at boot is slowing your boot time. It also gives you a boot speed rating that can change over time and the app is free!

I installed Bootracer shortly after getting this new Windows 8 computer. Bootracer showed 10 seconds to login (with fast boot turned off) and 22 seconds to a full, usable desktop. After a bit, I added WinPatrol and that resulted in Bootracer showing a few more seconds to desktop. WindowBlinds added a few more seconds but the real slowdown turned out to be NetMeter (the older version) and boot to desktop began to take 32 seconds instead of 26 without it. Antivirus would slow it even more but I only use Windows Defender so no third party AV to slow it down.

I see I have an old version of Bootracer...good thing I went to the website (so I could put the url here) and saw I need to get the new version!

»www.greatis.com/bootrace ··· urpc.htm

Actually, it is not good on new computers with Windows 8 to keep fast boot enabled because boot to login is so fast that you cannot intervene to access bios or OEM tests, etc. I have made boot to Safe Mode easily accessible during boot (why Microsoft removed that from Windows 8 is beyond me), but if fast boot was turned on, the screen for choosing Safe Mode would probably fly by so fast that I would not be able to choose it.

I have a Solid State Drive.

aurgathor
join:2002-12-01
Lynnwood, WA

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When Win8 shuts down, instead of a usual shutdown, it performs a 'kernel hibernation', and when it's turned on, instead of doing a usual power-on sequence, it wakes up from hibernation. This is indeed much faster than the usual boot.

One possibility for a long load time is that something prevents waking up from kernel hibernate, and Win8 has to perform a full start-up instead.

Michail
Premium Member
join:2000-08-02
Boynton Beach, FL

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I have to wonder if something could be going on with your hard drive and/or low memory? Those are really slow upgrade times too. My experiences has been Win 8.1 installs are really fast.

Wily_One
Premium Member
join:2002-11-24
San Jose, CA

1 recommendation

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If you want fast boot, upgrade to an SSD.

I have Win7 and I boot in ~30 seconds. And that's on a "slow" SSD with an old motherboard that doesn't support the latest SSD tech.
Gem
Premium Member
join:2005-09-10

1 edit

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Second that recommendation for an SSD drive. I recommend the Samsung line of SSDs, particularly the 840Evo for a big bang for the buck.

After that, more ram or better yet, get an intel i3 or i5 with a modern mobo to couple with an SSD and more ram.
lmacmil
join:2001-01-26
South Bend, IN

lmacmil

Member

I used MSCONFIG and disabled all the non-Microsoft services and all the startup items and rebooted. Here are the times from when the Windows logo first appeared:
Logo to signon screen: 1:45
Signon screen to desktop: 40
Desktop icons appear: 16
Can go to Win8 start screen from desktop: :40

So the total boot time is over 3 minutes. I know that's longer than Win7-64 took but I'm not sure how much.
BlitzenZeus
Burnt Out Cynic
Premium Member
join:2000-01-13

BlitzenZeus

Premium Member

Also remember one thing... You have five year old hardware running newer software.

Are you sure you have a 7200 rpm hdd?