Windows taking insanely long time to boot and reduced performance.

Question

Windows taking insanely long time to boot and reduced performance.

Anonymous

For the past day or two, my windows is taking insanely long times to boot (15-20 minutes). Also, the performance has become very slow (frequent crashes, long loading times for apps, etc.). If someone has any idea please help.

Some background:

I have a 2-year-old MSI laptop. The Windows is installed on an HDD (magnetic disk). The performance on HDD was typically slow but manageable. Recently I got an SSD and installed it within the laptop. I also installed Ubuntu 20.04 on the SSD and now my PC has dual boot functionality on separate disks. It has been 2-3 days since then. For the first day, I didn't log out of Ubuntu for the whole day. The second day when I logged back into Windows, it worked perfectly fine - even better than usual. I installed an Nvidia driver, took some backup on the cloud, and deleted some personal files (around 80GB - movies and stuff). I also played games for about 2 hours. Towards the night the PC began to slow down quite a bit. I logged into Ubuntu again. After about 2-3 hours, I had to log back into Windows. But it took too much time to start. I waited for 5 minutes, then just hold pressed the power button to force shut it down. I tried again and left the PC for about 20 minutes, during which it booted up. Today, again, when I tried to start Windows, it had got stuck on the "Please Wait" blue screen. After referring to online manuals, I force shut down three times to trigger the automatic repair tool, and from the Advanced settings in it, I booted in safe mode, which also took almost 10 minutes to complete. I was trying to stop a few services like Windows Error Reporting while in safe mode, but before I could do something, it began Restarting all by itself. During the restart boot up, it displayed the message "We could not install properly. Undoing Updates". This time, the boot operation took around 3-4 minutes which is about the normal time. But during this session, the performance was very degraded. Any app wouldn't startup. Even the notification bar wouldn't come up. Trivial things like animations, refresh, etc were working. Even the Windows menu wouldn't pop up, and I was forced to force shut down again. After another few minutes, I booted again (time ~25 minutes to boot), and in this current session, I am writing this.

Recent Activity

- Installed new SSD (PCI-E Gen 3, NVMe M.2).

Tried unsuccessfully to create a new volume in SSD with the NTFS file system.
Installed AOMEI Partition Assistant and created a new volume in SSD (around 5 GB).
Installed Nvidia drivers.
Multiplayer Gaming.
Installed Ubuntu 20.04 in SSD.
Changed BIOS settings to give preference to Ubuntu boot manager over Windows boot manager. (I always open up the boot menu and load Windows Boot Manager from there instead of from the grub menu in Ubuntu.)
Deleted some stuff from HDD storage.
Uninstalled AOMEI Partition Assistant.
Installed new quality updates for Windows and optional driver updates for Intel.

I have already tried all the methods listed in the community forum to improve PC performance. None of them have worked. Kindly help if anyone can.

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2 additional answers

Answer 1

-Hi, my name is Claudeir, I'm happy to help you!

Let's do a few steps, test if it resolved after each one:

At the moment the PC is slow, use Ctrl+Shift+Esc and see which process is using the most of your CPU/RAM.

I understand that you've already tried some methods, but not to leave anything behind, see if you've already followed these instructions:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/tip...

If necessary, check your system files and clean boot:

-Right click on start, run PowerShell(admin) or Command Prompt(admin)

Copy and paste the following command:

DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth

and press Enter.(Note: This step may take a few minutes to start and up to 30 minutes to complete).

After you see a message saying "The operation completed successfully", copy and paste this command:

sfc /scannow

and press Enter.

Wait for a message that says "Verification 100% complete".

So add this command:

chkdsk /f /r /b

Confirm with "Y" and restart the computer for this last step.

-Clean startup:

Clean boot is for you to determine if a background program is interfering with your system or to optimize your system load.

For clean boot follow the steps below:

On the Desktop, press the Windows + R keys simultaneously to open Run;

In the Run Menu type msconfig command and click OK to open System Configuration;

On the Services tab, check Hide All Microsoft Services and Click Disable All;

Click Apply and OK;

Restart the computer.

NOTE:This procedure disables all third-party services and programs. You can later, if the problem is solved in this way, enable the programs and services that will start with Windows, selectively, instead of keeping them all disabled. If the problem returns after activating the startup of a specific service or program, the problem is exactly in the startup of this software and it is recommended to remove it.

-Uninstall any third-party anti-malware, many antiviruses have their own removal tool. Visit the Installed Software website for more information. Your system will not be unprotected as Windows has its own security system that automatically enables as soon as you restart your computer.

leave just Windows Defender, then Windows+i, update and security, Windows security, open Windows security, virus and threat protection, scan options, tick and run a full scan, then tick and run an offline scan.

-Also go to the manufacturer's website to keep everything updated, Bios, Chipset, etc.

-If nothing can solve the problem, I suggest a recovery keeping your files, solving more problems with the system.

Windows+i>update and security>recovery>start now. You can keep your files.

-Feel free to leave your opinion, marking as answered if the answer helped, or leaving more details so that we can continue the service, this is very important to us.

Graciously,

Claudeir

Answer 2

Update: I tried the first method mentioned (Checking File System and Clean Boot). Thankfully it worked and now my boot time has decreased to 2 minutes as usual.

The first option, running DISM.exe took a lot of time (around 1 hour). The sfc /scannow also took a lot of time (~1.5 hours). Finally, I rebooted the system after initializing for disk check, which took about 1 hour. However, I noted an interesting thing here. For first 40 minutes or so, the screen seemed to be stuck on "Getting Windows Ready" screen. Later, it worked on updates (which I now believe might have been the cause of the delay). After this, I rebooted the system and whole thing completed in less than 5 minutes.

Anyways, this was my experience with it and it got resolved quickly because of the fast response by Claudeir. Thanks again for the help.

Answer 3

Hello and thanks for the quick reply. I am now trying the various things you mentioned, and to keep a reference for future users/future me, I am commenting out the results of each as I go through each step. Hope you don't mind.

Checking task manager:

Google Chrome is the highest consumer RAM (600 MB), followed by Antimalware Service Executable (500 MB) and Service Host: SysMain (100 MB). Total memory utilization ~ 60%
CPU: Total utilization ~ 26% with only Chrome and Windows Module installer having any significant contribution (~1% each).
Disk Utilization is pegged at 50% (usually it used to be almost 100% even in idle mode).

I have also already gone through the steps in the link you attached to no avail.

I will now proceed to check system files and clean boot and will comment again shortly.

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Windows taking insanely long time to boot and reduced performance.

2 additional answers