My 2010 model Toshiba Portege R-705 laptop (dual core Intel i3 processor and 8GB RAM) boots Win10 to a password prompt in 35 seconds and to the full Windows desktop in 1 minute 5 seconds. Yes, the UI performance is a bunch laggy for about 90 seconds after that. But at 2 minutes 45 seconds it’s 100% ready to go.
Yup, I bought this box 12 years ago next month; it’s a tween now and will be a teenager in just another 12 months.
The hard drive is a Hitachi HTS545050b9a300 which Google tells me is a 5400 RPM ~500GB mechanical hard drive.
I’m not denying @SmartAleq’s personal experience. I certainly don’t know what’s wrong with his laptop or how badly his Windows is damaged or crippled by disabling things that need to be running, but something is terribly wrong with that installation.
Yeah, it’s Windows. I’ve never had a fast booting computer until I tried Linux and seeing the difference even on first boot on a clean install going from Mint to Win10 this computer was so slow it was mind boggling. I have almost nothing installed, I use the same open source apps I always have and they’re chosen very specifically to be low resource apps. Doesn’t seem to help much though.
Oh, and not that it matters much, but I’m a her, not a him.
@SmartAleq That sounds like the way Windows 10 ran on my hard drive back in the day, and no one could explain why. It also sounds like how Windows 8.1 ran on a laptop I got with only a hard drive. Since then, I’ve always installed Windows on an SSD.
Do you know someone who knows a decent amount about computers who could do a full reinstall of Windows 10 and set up the drivers (from the Dell website)? Because it would probably do you a world of good.
Mint shouldn’t load that much faster than Windows, as it’s not a lite Linux distribution. Perhaps it is on the SSD, but Windows isn’t. Or Windows has the Virtual Memory on the hard drive–though that should be less of a problem with 12 GB of RAM.
Yes, well, it does not. It did not sing when it was first installed and I DID install the drivers from Dell. It sang very nicely in Linux, as soon as Windows was on it, it behaved like a crippled cow. Also, not sure why people think there’s an SSD in here because Device Manager only sees one, a Toshiba 1TB SATA drive. Disk Management says all three partitions are healthy. I don’t know why it’s this way but as I’m sitting here I have three computers that run regularly, two Win10 and one Win7 and they’re all slow AF to boot, although the Win7 is a lot faster since I swapped an SSD in there. Not lightning fast, but not glacial either. I’m sure an SSD would help things but I doubt it’s going to change things THAT much.
I really hate computers. I just like the things they do for me. Sigh.
All I know is that my computer went from taking 10 minutes to boot up to less than 30 seconds when I switched to an SSD. The same happened again when I swapped the drive on a laptop.
And I assumed it had an SSD because someone said it had both. I guess it’s just that the computer will allow an SSD.
I’m nearly certain that the slow hard drive is the bottleneck for you, and that a SSD would fix it. (I only mentioned the drivers because of needing to reinstall Windows.)
Or the model is configurable to be ordered with an SSD upgrade, that would be my guess. I don’t do hardware any more so by the time I bought an SSD and had someone install it then went to all the hassle of reinstalling the fucking mess of an OS I might as well just buy another laptop, make it Linux and this one can sit here until I need to use that one POS app that requires Windows (they don’t even have it available for MacOS, seriously WTF?) and I will reluctantly boot it up just to use the one app. The rest of the time it can sit on the Big Stack of Old Laptops I keep around–I used to have a drawerful of phones too because I’m very easy on electronic devices and they pretty much always go obsolete long before I give them enough wear and tear to break shit.
I guess this particular laptop just pisses me off so much because I had Linux on it for like eight months and it was so quick and easy to use and I was learning so much about the OS then I had to go and make it Windows–it would probably bug me a lot less if it had always sucked from the beginning like the other Windows boxes around here.
Are you installing the Dell version of Windows that comes with all their hot garbage apps, or are you installing a straight-from-Microsoft version of Windows 10?
That could be some of the issue; I recall on my wife’s old laptop, the software package that came with it was a complete and total pain in the butt to deal with- it installed what amounted to bloatware and malware by default- all sorts of monitoring crap that you could pay for, “easy” wizards to do stuff like set up wi-fi and so forth, none of which were actually part of Windows proper. All that trash adds up.
FWIW, I never could get her laptops to work right. Which was extra frustrating because I can (and have) build a desktop from parts and have it run without major issue for years, but I can’t get what’s supposed to be an integrated and tested piece of hardware to work right no matter how much effort I put in. The problem ended up being that the wi-fi card driver was buggy, and it would drop connection, then refuse to reconnect, etc… I finally tracked down a version of it that had that bug fixed, and then my kid (a toddler) promptly spilled stuff on it, destroying it.
Nope, got the laptop and immediately repartitioned the drive to wipe out the Windows boot partition. Installed Linux Mint from USB. Kept it in Linux for months, then my older laptop that was being used to service that one stupid app got charging port issues so I downloaded a clean copy of Windows straight from MS and installed that, then did a driver install from the Dell website. Seriously, this was a clean install that, right from the jump, was markedly slower than when it was running Linux. I should probably suss out how to do a virtual Windows machine in Linux, see if that will run the app.
Thing is, once it’s running and assuming it’s not tying up every available damned resource to facilitate the NEXT useless update, it’s fine. Just takes forever to boot up and Microsoft feels entitled to tie up my system for hours at a time whenever it pleases (and yes, I’ve tried those useless Win10 Settings things that say “only work on updates in this time window” but MS figures that “getting ready to install” isn’t the same thing as “installing” so that doesn’t work at all) and turn even simple browsing into an exercise in complete frustration. Hence why I have as many update services disabled as I can possibly find and only do updates when it’s convenient for ME. Windows apparently hates it that I should expect full use of the computer I bought and paid for though and does everything it can to change things–I’ve found services magically reenabled when I sure as hell didn’t go do it.
Do you leave the laptop on overnight periodically? If you’re not doing that, then it’s probably trying to download updates while you’re trying to work, and do other housekeeping-type stuff at the same time.
Or you could just have colossally bad drivers (a problem I’ve experienced with Dell), and the system is struggling to get answers from the hardware as a result. That happens on occasion, and can make things pretty damn sluggish.
Windows 10 as a general rule boots FAST. Between the fast-boot options in my BIOS and the way Windows 10 boots, my system can boot in like 10-15 seconds if I set it up like that. I don’t, because the fast-boot does some weird stuff with games apparently, so I stick with the 20-30 second regular boot.
Because it takes an age to boot up and I tend to keep weird hours my computers are basically never off. And I’ve tried different driver packs and I don’t think that’s it because sluggishness during operation is ALWAYS accompanied by one or more update services hogging resources. Yes, I always have Task Manager open so I can check on what the fuck is bogging things down NOW.