Why does my laptop take a while to start up?
Recently, when I turn on my laptop, the screen is black for five whole minutes (I timed it) until the Lenovo logo comes on and Windows boots. There’s no trouble with booting Windows after the Lenovo logo pops up. Once the logo shows up, everything is fine. But I wonder why it’s taking a while now to get to that point. Typically, I used to turn on the laptop and the Lenovo logo would appear instantly, booting the laptop immediately.
I turned off many startup programs a long time ago to prevent slowing down the startup, and there’s nothing new I installed. I looked online and tried something with the virtual memory under performance but that didn’t work.
There’s nothing else “wrong” with my laptop. The speed is fine and everything else checks out after a system check. But for some reason it just takes a while to get to the booting screen.
I have a Lenovo Edge 2 with Windows 10.
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9 Answers
Windows 10 likes to update itself a lot, and does lots of mysterious extra stuff.
Check your anti-virus. It maybe doing an update and check every time you start up.
Booting Linux from a USB drive would tell you if the problem is in hardware/firmware or Windows.
I like to use Puppy Linux for those kinds of tasks. It is small and boots fast with a minimum of fuss and distractions.
Too much stuff on your hard-drive. Delete un-needed stuff and defrag the disc.
I had a similar problem with my Dell. It turned out to be something related to my DVD reader. If I unplug that device the computer starts normally. If the DVD reader is plugged in – with nothing in it – the computer takes a long time to start up. Maybe I have a bad driver but I am too lazy to find out.
@kritiper It already defrags automatically from time to time. I’ve had the same hard drive capacity for the past year or so before this issue arose. I rarely install anything really big. Just documents and pictures. Also, I thought the idea that too many files affecting computer speed was not applicable anymore since that was only in old computers but not the case in newer computers, only that certain programs can affect startup if they try to load when Windows loads. But like I said, I practically disabled every program to start up when Windows starts.
@LuckyGuy My laptop doesn’t have a DVD reader. I only ever used an external DVD reader a couple times in the distant past.
In one of the updates this year, Win10 became very sensitive to the various apps loading on every startup. You can go in & untick the ones that you deem unnecessary on startup. You can still open the app when desired, but it just isn’t automatically running with every startup. I bet I had several dozen apps fighting for opening startup until I looked & turned off the startup option…now mine starts up faster!!!
Go to the search bar in the lower left corner & type “start” then click on “startup apps” on the very top. You will see a list of ALL the “on” apps & it tells you how important they are to the startup process. From there you slide the “on” toggle to “off”. You might need to do a restart to have it take effect. Good luck!!!
Turning off startup apps without knowing what they all do invites unintended consequences.
It would be better to do a clean install of Windows. Windows 10 makes it very easy, and includes and includes a “Reset” option which saves your files. Apps will be deleted, you need to re-install them.
Save your files to another drive first, whatever you do.
Microsoft – Recovery options in Windows 10
Just a guess. Maybe check that you don’t have two or more antivirus softwares at the same time?
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