3 Ways to Fix Slow Startup in Windows 10

In our previous article, we have explained how to speed up your Windows 10 PC. Besides general slowness, you’ve probably encountered agonizingly slow moments when powering on your Windows 10 PC. This is especially annoying when you have some urgent work to finish up or deliver, leading to wastage of lots of precious time. Often, the main culprit for slow boot up speed is startup applications which have high impact on the CPU.

Why Slow Startup?

The Windows startup process is very complex needing different software elements from drivers, registry, services and boot configuration. The hardware elements like your hard disk and RAM also plays a vital role.

Over period of time, as you install more desktop programs on your Windows PC, the computer boot or startup speed slows down. Some of the programs get added to the startup process and heavily impact the startup speed by hogging the RAM and CPU resources each time the system is powered on. Also the corrupted registry entries and driver files could also slow down the speedup process.

3 Ways to Fix Slow Startup in Windows 10

Use the following tips to fix slow startup issue:

1. Analyze startup apps using startup manager
2. Upgrade to SSD
3. Enable fast startup

1. Analyze Startup Apps Using Startup Manager

Windows comes with a very intuitive task manager that allows users to monitor startup processes and the impact they have on startup. There are several ways of accessing the task manager. You can simply right click on the taskbar and select ‘Task Manager’. Otherwise press ‘Windows + X’ shortcut keys to open power user menu and select ‘Task Manager’ option.

The ‘Task Manager’ dialog box will pop-up. Click on the ‘Startup’ tab and you will be presented with a screen as shown below.

The startup manager gives you an overview of applications, status and impact of each application on the startup process. Startup impact can either be Low, Medium, High or Not measured. When an application has a ‘Not measured’ status, this means that it’s a recently installed application and Windows hasn’t get a chance to assess it startup impact. Restarting of your PC will do the trick and you will see the impact afterwards. You can analyze the apps that have high impact on the startup time and decide whether you need that app on startup.

Disabling High Impact Apps

For applications with a High startup impact, it’s recommended that you disable them to improve the load on RAM and CPU. In order to disable the application just right click on it and select ‘Disable’ option. You can also select the application and click on the ‘Disable’ button.

Some applications like OneDrive and Drobox may require some consideration before they are disabled from Startup. This is mainly because they are actively involved in automatic synchronization of files to the cloud. If disabled, then automatic synchronization of files in the background will fail unless the applications are launched. Chatting Apps like Skype are also recommended to start on boot so that users can instantly get logged in and receive pending messages and chats.

To get more insights about a program, right click on it and select ‘Search Online’.

2. Upgrade to SSD

Another way you can significantly improve the boot up speed of your Windows 10 PC is to upgrade to a Solid State Drive or SSD. Apart from drastically improving on boot up speed, it will make running of applications, saving and retrieval of files much faster. This is because an SSD does not have the mechanical components like the traditional Hard Disk which has spinning disks, mechanical arms and actuators.

Solid State Drive is made up of integrated circuits which make it more robust, less susceptible to mechanical failure and lasts longer than the ordinary mechanical drives. With an SSD drive, it takes just about 15 seconds to boot up your PC compared to 60 seconds for a traditional hard drive. Remember, all Apple MacBook products uses SSD storage for high speed and performance.

3. Turn on Fast Startup

Another setting you can adjust to improve on your start up time is the ‘Turn on Fast startup’. To accomplish this,

• Open ‘Control Panel’.
• Click on ‘Hardware and Sound’ option.
• Select ‘Power Options’.

On the left pane click on ‘Choose what the power button does’ option.

Next, you’ll be presented with many options. Under ‘Shutdown settings’ enable the checkbox against ‘Turn On Fast startup’ and click on ‘Save Changes’ button.

Conclusion

It’s recommended that users keep track of applications running on startup and ensure that they have minimal impact on the time and performance. We hope the ways will help to speedup the startup time in your Windows 10 PC. In addition, keep your PC always clean and try to avoid installing unnecessary applications to improve the speed.