I have an old computer running Windows 10. Even when it was new, it always took ages to get into Windows. We’re talking 5+ minutes to get to the desktop if Updates weren’t running, then another several before I could open an application. Completely unusable without losing one’s sanity.
For reasons other than none I decided to start using it again but try to fix the problem.
Ground Zero: I doubled the RAM with a second 8GB chip identical to the original as far as I can tell. $10 shipped on Ebay. Already, you can see I’m not working with much, but it’s plenty for what I need. The processor in this machine is the fastest for its socket, so to upgrade would mean acquiring a different motherboard and cpu. This wouldn’t be a wise use of money or time. Down the road I may install an SSD to help out the speed, but it’s 10-yo-platters for now. Weirdly, 672 GB capacity, so a 1TB SSD would be a nice upgrade.
First software change:
Disabling any resource-hogging startup apps. Simple enough: search for startup and open. Disable the unwanted apps. Done.
Next up:
Defrag said the system was fine. So I skipped for now.
The system was still very sluggish. I could hear the internals whirring and doo-dadding. So I checked TaskManager’s Performance tab to find Disk at 100% activity, no fluctuations except the occasional blip from a red background to green then back to red.
I figured that was probably the hang up.
So, from an Admin command prompt, I ran
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth
This came up clean.
At this point, the Disk activity started behaving in a seemingly normal fashion. But there was still more to check.
Now the nasty one. Again from Admin command prompt:
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth
This time, the terminal hanged. No response for any amount of time. After twenty minutes, I closed the window and process and tried again. Same thing. I initiated a system update, hoping this would resolve the problem.
It didn’t.
Time to bring out the artillery.
From task manager, I killed the processes TrustedInstaller and Tiworker. I could have also stopped Windows Updater wuauserv but decided to try the above first. As you may know, TrustedInstaller and WindowsUpdater are initiated by services. So to fully stop the process, you need to disable the service. Instead I figured that while it would respawn the service, killing the active process would at least wipe the service’s memory.
And sure enough, running ScanHealth then worked! It took a few minutes to start displaying progress. Then about half an hour later, No component store corruption detected, operation completed successfully.
Finally, on to (again from admin command prompt):
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth
This also worked, taking about a minute to start and 10 minutes to run.
I then restarted again and everything held. You would think it should, but this is often not always the case with Windows. Shutdown took nearly thirty seconds. Startup took over two minutes, and I was able to launch Chrome in under three-and-a-half.
I’m crossing my elbows, but so far so good. Maybe there’s more that can be done. I’m thinking BIOS, but we’ll see.
Update: I poked around in BIOS and in Windows Power settings. Power already had fast startup enabled, but that only affects awaking from sleep or hibernate, i.e. a hard boot or restart will not be affected. So, in BIOS I changed a few things. I disabled legacy boot for UEFI, and I also switched drive order, giving a direct line to my boot loader rather than the default USB Live boot. I also disabled DVD in the boot sequence. This only shaved a few seconds off, so I may switch back. But a bigger improvement was running Chrome Extension OneTab prior to closing Chrome. This resulted in over thirty seconds gained when opening that app from a restart. So, I’m somewhere around two minutes and thirty seconds from boot to a working Chrome tab. I’m pretty happy with that. Could be faster though… I found a 1TB SSD for $50… now I just need to determine if I want to go through with fresh OS installs.