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

1 edit

lmacmil

Member

Add-in PCI-E card slows Windows 7 boot time

I recently added a PCI-E card to give me USB 3.0 ports. The card works fine but my boot time went from 17 seconds (when the desktop appears) to well over a minute. It sits on the "starting Windows" screen for about 90 seconds. The only thing connected to this card is a USB 3.0 SD card reader. I have not tried booting without the card reader attached.

What is strange is the custom "boot performance" logs I set up in Event Viewer don't show any significant change in boot time from before the USB 3 card was installed. Any ideas?

Camelot One
MVM
join:2001-11-21
Bloomington, IN

Camelot One

MVM

said by lmacmil:

I have not tried booting without the card reader attached.

Start by trying that.
Then try removing the card itself, to see if the delay is being caused by the physical card being there, or by the drivers you installed for it.

Once you find the cause of the delay, you can look at options to correct it.
lmacmil
join:2001-01-26
South Bend, IN

1 edit

lmacmil

Member

Booting w/o the USB card reader did not speed things up. It sat on the "starting Windows" screen (and there was no animation) for over 1 min until I got the blue Welcome screen. The desktop appeared at 1:18 and the icons refreshed at 1:37. These times were just a little faster than it used to boot from the HDD.

It has to be the card itself because I recall now that it took long to boot as soon as I turned on the PC after installing it, even before the drivers were installed.

BlueMist
join:2011-01-24
Cookeville, TN

BlueMist

Member

Go into the motherboard settings and check out your system's boot order.

Your system may have installed the new USB/PCI-E card ahead of your internal hard drive in the boot order causing the system to go into a wait state while the system tries to find a device attached to the USB/PCI-E card to boot from. Basically set the boot drive as the first item in the boot string and see if that helps.

Camelot One
MVM
join:2001-11-21
Bloomington, IN

Camelot One

MVM

I don't think that is it. That would cause a delay prior to Windows beginning to start up, not after.

I tend to be rather methodical when I test, so I would start by enabling boot logging, recording the results, then removing the card and repeating. That would be to identify where in the windows startup process the problem occurs, and to make sure it goes away when the card is physically removed.

It could be something as simple as the card demanding specific resources, (IRQ and such), and Windows is taking a while to reassign them from other devices.
lmacmil
join:2001-01-26
South Bend, IN

lmacmil

Member

said by Camelot One:

I would start by enabling boot logging, recording the results, then removing the card and repeating.

I have a boot log from before the card was installed and after. Strangely the "boot times" are within 20 seconds of each other despite the fact that with the card installed the "starting Windows" screen lasts over a minute. However, the "BootStartTime" and "BootEndTime" are the same without the card and with the card the end time is 2:16 after the start time. Why that difference is not reflected in the "boot time" entry is beyond me.

The only other difference I see is the item "BootIsRootCauseIdentified" which is "true" without the card and "false" with the card.

I have no idea what to make of this.