Windows 10 is a great improvement over the Windows 8 and the Windows 8.1. The latest Microsoft OS version doesn’t have too many problems unlike its predecessor, except few if you want to dig them out. Fortunately, the boot time is not one of them. The Windows 10 boots fast enough! How fast? Well, fast enough not to make you leave your computer and get engaged with other tasks. Want to make your Windows 10 boot even faster? Here I will be showing some tips and tweaks to optimize your Windows boot time. The time your system takes to start from the dead is known as boot time. The boot time depends on the internal processes. By default, the Windows 10 comes with a Faster Startup feature, but as the time passes, the third party software installations can make your system boot slowly. However, if you can keep your system in good condition by making the occasional cleanup, you may never have to face this problem. So, what are the options? Let’s have a look at the options to make Windows 10 boot faster. Find Windows 10 Boot Time Before you proceed with the steps to improve your boot time, you should find the current boot time of your Windows 10 PC. You can make use of a stopwatch on your smartphone or an online stopwatch to calculate the time taken for a complete boot. Alternatively, you can get the accurate boot time of your last few boots using the Windows Event Viewer. Open Windows Event Viewer. To do this, click on search/Cortana and type Event. From the search results, select Event Viewer. In the Event Viewer, navigate to, Application and Services Logs > Microsoft > Windows and expand it. Next, look for “Diagnostics-Performance” folder and expand it as well. Click on Operational. It will display all the events related to this category. Here you have to look for the event ID 100. Event ID 100 shows your boot related logs. Click on the event ID 100 and under Event 100, Diagnostic Performance look for Windows has started up: Here the Boot Duration should be in milliseconds. Convert it to minutes to get the better idea of the boot time. If you click on the Details tab, you can find more information about what is causing your PC to boot slower. My last boot time was 2.4 minutes, which is quite good for an old computer with old hardware and without SSD. However, there are few things that I can do to reduce the boot time of my Windows 10 PC such as enabling Fast Startup feature, disabling startup programs, and startup services, etc. Enable Fast Startup in Windows 10 Similar to Windows 8, the Windows 10 also comes with a built-in feature called Fast Startup. As the name suggests, the Fast Startup feature allows your PC to start as fast as possible. What it does is, it stores the kernel session and devices in the hiberfil.Sys file on the system drive. When you restart your system, the PC will load the information from this file making it faster to restart or in simple terms your system resumes from the hibernate mode. The Fast Startup feature in Windows 10 is enabled by default, but make sure that it is enabled. To do this, Click on the Battery Icon (if you are on a laptop) and select Power Options. If you are on a PC, go to Control Panel, click Hardware and Sound. Select Power Options here. From the left side, click Choose what the power button do. Next, click Change settings that are currently unavailable. Under Shutdown settings check Turn on fast startup (recommended). Click the Save Changes button at the bottom and restart your computer to apply the changes. After the restart check the boot time again and see if you find any difference. If you had it disabled, then you should see a significant difference in boot time of about 1 minute or may be more. Disable Startup Programs and Startup Services Disable Startup Programs Startup programs are the programs that start as soon as you restart your PC. This not only adds excessive load to your system but can also increase the boot time significantly if large in number. A wise thing you can do here is to disable Startup programs. To disable startup programs in Windows 10 you can either follow the previous link or follow the steps below. To disable Startup programs, you need to open the Task Manager. Open Task Manager by right-clicking on the taskbar and selecting Task Manager. When the task manager opens, click the Startup tab. Under Startup tab, you can see all the startup programs listed. Look in the Startup impact tab at the right side and disable all the programs with high startup impact. Select the startup program that you want to disable and then click the Disable button. Disable Startup Services To disable startup services you need to open the System Configuration. Open the Run Dialogue box by pressing Windows Key R and type msconfig. Hit enter; it will open the System Configuration window. At every restart, Windows automatically launches several services that many not be useful to the user. The Startup services can also increase the boot time. To disable the Startup services, click the Services tab in System Configuration window. Be careful with the Microsoft services here. If you check the box Hide all Microsoft services, all the Microsoft services will be hidden. Later, you can proceed with disabling any unwanted services. Once disabled, restart your PC. After the restart, check the boot time again and see if the boot time has reduced and the Windows 10 boots faster than before. For this test, I disabled the Windows Media Player Network Sharing. After the restart, the time saved was about 40 seconds. The Windows 10 booted 40 seconds faster than before. Which is a significant improvement over the last recorded boot time? Want your PC to boot even faster? Get an SSD! Solid State Drives (SSD) are the expensive alternatives to your standard HDD but makes your PC work much faster. If you have an SSD installed, and the Windows installation is on the SSD, your PC would boot in less than 20 sec. However, for this speed, you need to spend a little extra. You can have a look at the available SSD options from the manufacturers like Samsung, Kingston, SanDisk, etc. at Amazon.com (US and others) and Amazon.in (India). So, these are some tips and tricks to make your Windows PC boot even faster. How much time did you save and what are the programs you disabled to make your Windows 10 PC boot faster?
