Very Slow Boot on a Windows 10 T520

[chzuck]

Boot is painfully slow on my T520 running Windows 10. In checking some things I noticed the BIOS version is not the latest one listed for Windows 8. Did not see one for Windows 10. Current BIOS is 8AET56WW (1.36). It was faster before the later updates for Windows 10. Any ideas on what I could check or how to update the BIOS. I tried updating to 1.49, but the blue screen appears and the BIOS did not install.

[dr_st]

It's unlikely that the BIOS is the cause of your slowness. If you still want to update it, do it via a bootable ISO, not through Windows - a crash during BIOS update at the wrong time can brick your machine.

Your machine was never intended to have Windows 10 on it. It is possible that with the latest batch of updates some interface broke between the new software and the old hardware. Or it may be just a software glitch caused by one of these updates. We all know, Windows updates are far from fail-safe.

If your problem is specifically with boot time, and after that the PC performs fine, you could try one of the boot analysis tools mentioned, e.g., here:
https://www.thewindowsclub.com/measure- ... me-windows

[chzuck]

I did find something that has seemed to help reduce boot time. KeePass was loading at startup and I saw it was a high user. I disabled it and boot time has dropped.

[chzuck]

Windows 10 PRO got corrupted, tried to reinstall and for some reason file explorer was messed up. So I decided to format the hard drive and install Mint 21. Thinking if will boot faster with Linux. It takes a minute and 35 seconds to fully boot Mint 21. That seems really slow. Why is the T520 so slow? Does not seem much faster than Windows 10 or booting Mint 21 from a live USB. Maybe time to retire the old 520.

[RealBlackStuff]

HDD or SSD or hybrid?

[TPFanatic]

Your hard drive might be dying. Granted, in this day and age a hard drive will make any machine feel slow.

[dr_st]

Your hard drive might be dying. Granted, in this day and age a hard drive will make any machine feel slow.

It also seems to be true that hard drives slow down with age / operation hours. And modern hard drives are often faster than old ones, even out of the box.

[chzuck]

HDD in my T520. Never gave that a thought. Time for another drive then. I will give that a try and report back.