Fix Slow Startup on Windows 10 and 11

Slow Windows startup usually comes down to one of four causes: too many startup programs, a mechanical hard drive, the wrong Fast Startup setting, or slow firmware. Work out which one before changing anything, because Windows already records the answer in Event Viewer.

Most guides hand you a list of ten fixes and let you try them at random. That’s backwards. Windows already records why your boot is slow, you just have to look. This guide shows you how to find the actual cause first, then fix that specific thing.

First: measure your boot time

Before changing anything, find out how slow “slow” actually is, and which part is slow.

Check your BIOS time

Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager
Click the Startup apps tab
Look at the top-right corner for Last BIOS time

Anything under 10 seconds is normal. If you’re seeing 25, 40, or 60 seconds here, your problem is in the firmware, not Windows — skip to the UEFI/BIOS section.

Check the Windows side

Windows logs every boot in Event Viewer:

Press Win + R, type eventvwr.msc, press Enter
Go to Applications and Services Logs → Microsoft → Windows → Diagnostics-Performance → Operational
Click Filter Current Log on the right, type 100 in the Event ID box, press OK

Event ID 100 is a boot event. Open the most recent one and read BootTime, that’s your total in milliseconds. A healthy machine lands between 15,000 and 30,000. Also look for:

Event ID 101: an app took longer than usual to start
Event ID 102: a driver took longer than usual
Event ID 103: a service took longer than usual

These name the exact culprit. If Event 102 keeps pointing at your graphics driver, you now know where to spend your time instead of guessing.

Fix 1: Sort out Fast Startup (the confusing one)

Search for this problem and you’ll find one article telling you to turn Fast Startup off and another telling you to turn it on. Both are right, for different machines.

Fast Startup doesn’t fully shut your PC down. It saves the Windows kernel memory image to a hibernation file and reloads it next time, which skips a chunk of the boot process.

Turn it ON if: you have an SSD, a single OS, and no unusual hardware. It genuinely saves several seconds.

Turn it OFF if any of these apply:

You’re on a mechanical hard drive — reading the hibernation file off an HDD can be slower than a clean boot
You dual-boot with Linux — Fast Startup leaves the Windows partition locked
You can’t get into your BIOS/UEFI by tapping the key at startup
Windows Updates keep failing to finish installing
Your boot got slower right after a Windows feature update

How to change it:

Open Control Panel and set View by to Small icons
Click Power Options
Click Choose what the power buttons do
Click Change settings that are currently unavailable
Tick or untick Turn on fast startup (recommended)
Click Save changes

If the option isn’t there at all, hibernation is disabled. Open Command Prompt as administrator and run powercfg /hibernate on, then check again.

Test both ways. Time three boots with it on, three with it off, and keep whichever wins on your machine.

Fix 2: Cut down startup programs

This is the fix everyone knows, and it’s still the most common cause of the gap between the login screen and a usable desktop. Microsoft’s own performance guidance says the same thing: apps that launch at startup slow boot time and add background load.

Ctrl + Shift + Esc → Startup apps tab
Sort by the Startup impact column
Right-click anything marked High that you don’t need immediately → Disable

Safe to disable for almost everyone: Spotify, Steam, Discord, Epic Games Launcher, Adobe Creative Cloud, Teams, Zoom, iTunes/Apple Devices, OneDrive (if you don’t need instant sync), printer utilities, GPU “experience” apps.

Leave alone: anything from your antivirus, audio drivers (Realtek), touchpad or trackpoint drivers, OEM battery utilities on laptops.

Disabling doesn’t uninstall anything. The app still works — it just won’t launch itself the moment you log in.

The part most guides skip: Task Manager doesn’t show everything. Some apps hide in Task Scheduler instead. Press Win + R, type taskschd.msc, open Task Scheduler Library, and look for tasks with an At log on trigger. Updater tasks from Adobe, Java, and Google are common offenders here.

If switching entries off one at a time gets you nowhere, do a clean boot or start the machine in Safe Mode on Windows 11. Both load Windows with almost nothing third-party running, so a quick boot there tells you the cause is software rather than hardware.

Fix 3: Find out if you’re still on a hard drive

If your PC is more than about six years old, or it was a budget model, there’s a real chance Windows is running from a mechanical drive. No software fix will help meaningfully if that’s the case.

Ctrl + Shift + Esc → Performance tab
Click your disk in the left column
Look at the top-right — it will say SSD or HDD

If it says HDD, that’s your answer. A basic SATA SSD costs under $40 and will take boot time from two minutes to twenty seconds. Nothing else on this list comes close to that improvement.

Desktops are straightforward. Most laptops from the last decade have a single 2.5-inch bay or an M.2 slot; check your model number before buying. Tools like Macrium Reflect Free will clone your existing install across so you don’t have to reinstall Windows.

Fix 4: Update your graphics driver properly

A bad or mismatched display driver stalls the boot right around the point where the screen would normally light up. Windows Update ships generic drivers that often lag behind or install the wrong version after a feature update.

Win + X → Device Manager
Expand Display adapters and note what you have
Download the driver from the vendor directly, not from Windows Update: – Nvidia: the Nvidia App – AMD — Adrenalin Software – Intel — Driver & Support Assistant
Choose a clean install if the installer offers it
Restart

If the boot slowdown started immediately after a driver update, do the opposite: Device Manager → right-click the adapter → Properties → Driver tab → Roll Back Driver.

Fix 5: Clear out the old driver store

Here’s one that almost never appears in these lists. Every time a driver updates, Windows keeps the old version in C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore. After a few years that folder holds dozens of dead driver packages, and Windows still scans them at boot.

Press Win + R, type cleanmgr, press Enter
Choose your C: drive
Click Clean up system files
Tick Device driver packages, Previous Windows installation(s), Windows Update Cleanup, and Temporary files
Click OK

On a machine that’s been running for a few years this can free 10–30 GB and shave real seconds off the boot. It’s completely safe — Windows keeps the driver currently in use.

Fix 6: Clean up your UEFI/BIOS settings

If Task Manager showed a Last BIOS time above 10 seconds, this is where your time is going, and no Windows setting will fix it.

Restart and tap Del, F2, or F10 (your motherboard’s splash screen says which). Then:

Turn off Fast Boot’s opposite, enable it. Confusingly, the firmware has its own “Fast Boot” setting, separate from Windows Fast Startup. Enabling it skips hardware checks you don’t need on every power-on.
Set the boot order so your Windows drive is first. If a USB or network boot sits above it, the firmware waits for a timeout every single time.
Disable network/PXE boot if you don’t boot from a network.
Check your RAM speed profile. Enabling XMP or EXPO won’t speed up boot much, but a memory-training loop on some boards adds 10+ seconds. If your board retrains RAM every boot, look for a “Memory Context Restore” or “Fast Training” option and enable it.
Unplug what you don’t use. Extra drives, card readers, and USB hubs all get enumerated during POST.

While you’re in there, look at the Secure Boot entry too. A machine reporting Secure Boot State as Unsupported is usually still booting through the legacy CSM path, which loads old option ROMs during POST instead of skipping past them.

Fix 7: Repair corrupted system files

If Windows itself is damaged, the boot process retries and stalls. Two commands fix most of it, and Microsoft’s repair instructions are explicit that they run in this order. Open Command Prompt or Terminal as administrator:

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

Wait for it to finish — it can sit at 20% for several minutes, which is normal. Then:

sfc /scannow

DISM repairs the component store that SFC pulls its replacement files from, which is why running SFC alone often reports problems it “could not fix.” Restart when both finish.

Fix 8: Check the paging file

Windows sometimes reassigns virtual memory to the wrong drive after an update, particularly if you have more than one disk. If your paging file lands on a slow secondary drive, boot suffers.

Search for Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows
Advanced tab → Change under Virtual memory
Confirm the paging file is on your C: drive
In most cases, leave Automatically manage ticked

Only set a custom size if you have a specific reason. The “set it to 1.5× your RAM” advice you’ll see repeated online is left over from the Windows XP era and doesn’t apply to modern Windows.

Fix 9: Turn off features you don’t use

Press Win and search for Turn Windows features on or off. Untick anything you genuinely don’t use:

Windows Subsystem for Linux — only if you don’t run Linux tools
Hyper-V — only if you don’t use virtual machines or WSL2
Windows Sandbox
Internet Information Services (IIS)

Each one loads services at boot. Restart after unticking.

Fix 10: Rule out malware

Cryptominers and adware are built to start with Windows and hide from Task Manager. Run a full scan with Windows Security (Settings → Privacy & security → Windows Security → Virus & threat protection → Scan options → Full scan), and follow it with a free Malwarebytes scan for a second opinion.

Last resort: reset Windows

If nothing above worked, reinstall. Back up your files first, then go to Settings → System → Recovery. The route differs slightly on the older OS, and our walkthrough of how to reinstall Windows 10 covers that version step by step.

Try Fix problems using Windows Update → Reinstall now first. It reinstalls the same version of Windows while preserving your apps, files, and settings, much less disruptive than a full reset. If that doesn’t help, use Reset this PC and choose Keep my files.

Quick reference

Symptom	Most likely fix
Last BIOS time over 10 seconds	Fix 6 — UEFI/BIOS settings
Slow between login and usable desktop	Fix 2 — startup programs
Black screen for a long stretch before the logo	Fix 6 — boot order
Everything is slow, not just boot	Fix 3 — check for HDD
Started right after a Windows update	Fix 1 — Fast Startup, then Fix 4
Started right after a driver update	Fix 4 — roll back the driver
Event Viewer names a specific service	Disable that service
Machine is 3+ years old, no single cause	Fix 5 — driver store cleanup

Common questions

Why does my PC take 30 minutes to boot?

A 30-minute Windows boot is not a settings problem, it almost always means failing storage. Open Command Prompt as administrator and run chkdsk C: /f /r, then check the drive’s SMART health with a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo. If it reports Caution or Bad, back up and replace the drive.

Is it safe to disable all startup programs?

Mostly, yes. Disabling a startup entry in Windows Task Manager does not uninstall or break the app, you simply launch it yourself when you need it. Leave antivirus, audio and touchpad driver entries, and OEM battery utilities enabled. Everything else can safely be switched off.

Does more RAM make Windows boot faster?

Barely. Extra RAM helps once you are working, especially with many apps or browser tabs open, but it does little for boot time. Windows startup speed is dominated by storage type, SSD versus mechanical hard drive, and by how many programs launch themselves at login.

Why did my boot get slow suddenly?

Something changed. Work backwards from the date it started: a Windows feature update, a driver update, a newly installed app that added itself to startup, or a drive beginning to fail. The Diagnostics-Performance log in Event Viewer usually points at the exact day boot time jumped.

Should Fast Startup be on or off?

Leave Windows Fast Startup on if your PC has an SSD and runs a single copy of Windows. Turn it off if you are on a mechanical hard drive, dual-boot with Linux, cannot reach your BIOS, or keep hitting failed updates. Time three boots each way before deciding.

Still stuck? Open Event Viewer, filter for Event ID 101, 102 and 103, and note what they name. That’s your specific bottleneck, and it beats working through a generic checklist.