Upgrade to W/10 with quicker bootups!

[Pieere]

I don't have nearly the experience with Windows 10 that Ed Bott has, but I can say that in my recent experience with the latest Microsoft OS, there seems to be no good reason to remain using Windows 8 or 8.1. Windows 7 is a different matter, because some systems are just so well suited to Windows 7 that it makes sense to keep running them to end-of-life on Windows 7.

Windows 8 and 8.1 don't bring anything to the table that Windows 10 doesn't. They're much-maligned systems, fraught with controversy. They need hacks and add-ons to be able to use comfortably. Plus, given both my experience recently and Adrian's discussion of older environments, Windows 10 seems to outperform Windows 8 and 8.1 installations hands down.

I don't have the savvy to give you the article in ZDNet that I pasted this from but W/10 loads much faster.

[RV_]

I can verify that as I have a laptop with a single core Celeron slooooow machine with 2 GB of old DDR2 RAM and a hard drive. I loaded Windows 10 on it and it brought it from a 3 minute boot until it was responsive to 2 minutes. I ordered 2 more GB of RAM for its max of 4 GB RAM, I put a Team Dark 256 SSD in it and it boots in under 20 seconds now and is responsive at about 30 seconds. My newer units boot in 10 seconds and are responsive almost immediately.

 

I like 10. No apologies.

[TheDuke]

RV: my experiance is equal to yours.

Every MS OS gets a bum rap with every new release. No one blames the PC mfg for not updating their drivers etc,

Apple has a closed envirinment and still has hardware issues.

Linux users have to wait until someone writes a driver for their OS before they can use the latest equipment.

Yes there are other issues, but everyone has thoses otherwise why is there a need for forums.

[Jack Mayer]

Guess I'm going to have to look into an SSD for this machine. It boots from off in about 3 minutes but is not responsive for another 2. It is an i7 machine with maxed out 8 gig ram. If I go the SSD route I'll have to reorganize my data since I have about 600 GB of music on this machine. But it is also all in the Cloud. I'l have to move that to a dedicated external drive....which is probably a smart thing to do, anyway.

[Tom_M]

I installed a Seagate 1TB hybrid drive in my notebook. This drive has an 8GB solid state flash section where your most used software is cached. My boot time decreased significantly. Much cheaper than an all solid state drive. Seagate now has a drive with a 32GB cache.

[Jack Mayer]

I'll have to look at that Tom. Thanks.

[RV_]

Tom,

Those are good drives and I had one in my desktop system of three years ago, and I replaced it with an SSD. If you read the reviews of the hybrid SSHD (Solid state and hard drive hybrid drive) it has less effect on boot times than on actual working lag times. The idea of using 8 GB as a cache to increase performance could be done, and still can be done, with USB fast flash drives if their read write speeds were faster than the hard drive speeds using readyboost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost

 

I put an SSD in that machine the Seagate SSHD in it like yours Tom, and there is no comparison. The SSD was so much faster.

 

Jack, no computer here had more than 256GB SSDs which are selling for a lot less today. Our music is still on our main desktops which each are all in ones with a 32GB SSD in front of my 2TB on mine, and my wife's is a 1 TB rust drive and all because she does not care as once it is fully booted it is plenty fast for her. However with the price of microSD cards goiung down as fast as the SSDs there are lots of options for music and picttures.

 

From a guy who has used both. no offense Tom, but the SSD is way faster than the hybrid SSHD from Seagate. I still have mine and use it for storage now.

 

OK drives I have used and know are good and fast and reliable. Samsung EVO 3d, Crucial BX100 (the old M4 series I had first is no longer available) and the Toshiba which gave me fits after cloning it from the SSHD Seagate but is going gangbusters in her old machine, and the Team Dark L3 SSD, all are 240-256GB sizes and fast, with no issues. I also like all ADATA products and would not hesitate to buy their well receive SSDs. I also have no hesitation to buy the Intel and SanDisk SSDs. BTW Intel just bought SanDisk for billions.

 

I have USB powered WD My Passport 2.5" 1TB external, about ten more 2.5" externals from previous laptops and salvaged ones from computers that had bad power supplies or mobos all in USB3 powered 2.5" enclosures when they go on sale for about 7 bucks each. And I have my trusty Themaltake BlacX 5G drive dock with USB 3. I keep a 1TB Seagate 3.5" in it specifically for images and backups. I've about 20TB of drives labeled and inventoried. Heck I have a 3TB Lenovo EZ Media personal cloud system I have not even fully deployed yet and it is in the drawer.

 

Storing data is not an issue, and if a $160.00 or so price tag isn't out of the question there are a lot of NAS personal cloud systems like this: http://www.amazon.com/Cloud-Personal-Network-Attached-Storage/dp/B00EVVGAD0/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1463353984&sr=1-1-fkmr1&keywords=driveless+NAS

 

Look at these prices from today: http://www.newegg.com/Internal-SSDs/SubCategory/ID-636 and http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Assd%20sale

 

The ideal way to do this is to get a drive wire or external dock. Then use EaseUS free or Macrium to clone the drive to the SSD. However the best of them will clone a larger drive to a smaller one as long as the uncompressed data does not exceed the capacity of the new drive. For example, a 1TB drive with 800GB cannot go on a 256GB SSD, but a 1TB hard drive with 150GB of data on it can. The program I have had the most luck with is from Apricorn and it comes with the drive wire to connect them if you don't have the drive dock already here: http://www.apricorn.com/products/software/ezgig.html but it only works with their hardware. I use this: http://www.amazon.com/Apricorn-Notebook-Upgrade-Connection-ASW-USB3-25/dp/B005C983NA You buy the drivewire from Amazon but despite it coming with the disk each time you are about to clone a drive connect the drivewire and then download the latest version from that first Apricorn EZ page above as they are always upgrading the software. Then you can use the drivewire as an external drive dock for all USB powered 2.5" drives to read them. I prefer to get an external drive and save the HD for at least six months. Why? Because you can then clone it back to another SSD should it fail, or pop it back in for a fast replacement until you get another SSD. Todays SSDs need not be a source of worry but keeping the old HD in a case and cloning the SSD back to it from time to time keeps you with a full image EZ PZ.

[docj]

Guess I'm going to have to look into an SSD for this machine. It boots from off in about 3 minutes but is not responsive for another 2. It is an i7 machine with maxed out 8 gig ram. If I go the SSD route I'll have to reorganize my data since I have about 600 GB of music on this machine. But it is also all in the Cloud. I'l have to move that to a dedicated external drive....which is probably a smart thing to do, anyway.

 

Jack:

 

I just ran this test for you. I have a Dell Inspiron running Windows 10 with an i7 and 16GB RAM that boots from an SSD. I just timed it from the moment I clicked on "Restart". It took 30 seconds to reach the "lock screen" after bootup and at 50 seconds total elapsed time I had an open tab of Chrome with Google News displayed.

 

I'm a rather impatient kind of guy and have always detested the innocuous "your computer has to be restarted to complete this installation" message. But not any longer!

 

Joel

[skunk workz]

 

Jack:

 

I just ran this test for you. I have a Dell Inspiron running Windows 10 with an i7 and 16GB RAM that boots from an SSD. I just timed it from the moment I clicked on "Restart". It took 30 seconds to reach the "lock screen" after bootup and at 50 seconds total elapsed time I had an open tab of Chrome with Google News displayed.

 

I'm a rather impatient kind of guy and have always detested the innocuous "your computer has to be restarted to complete this installation" message. But not any longer!

 

Joel

 

 

 

This is similar to what I saw in 7, and see in 10: < 30 seconds to the lock screen, and another 20 or so to a fully usable desktop (with numerous FF tabs open, Outlook launched, etc).

[wildmandmc]

agreed, that is what i tell my customers, if you have 7 stay with it, 8 / 8.1 dump it.

if you pc takes more that just over a minute to boot, look into start up see what you can stop from start up.

run msconfig, uncheck programs you don't need right off the bat, this won't delete it just prevent start up. one of my play laptops w/ win 10 less than 30 seconds to fully boot.

[Jack Mayer]

I have startup "tuned".

 

Guess I'm getting an SSD.

[RV_]

Jack,

My old "yet to be sold" Toshiba laptop with the A6 quad core and only 6GB of RAM is 20 seconds to the desktop, not just the start screen. It has an SSD and I just timed it. It is just a few seconds, no more than five before it is responsive. I have another single core Celeron laptop with 4 GB of DDR2 RAM that takes 30 seconds to get to the desktop but almost two minutes until the prefetch and boot is complete enough to be responsive. It has all my free utilities on it, Speccy, CCleaner, Libre Office and the English offline help files, Malwarebytes Free, and uses Defender as the primary anti malware program.

 

May I suggest something before your swap? I am pretty sure you know about prefetch and the rest I am about to outline, and the explanations I am about to post, but if not, or for our beginner's/others reading who haven't a clue what that is, the short answer is Prefetch is what your computer is doing between the lock screen and until it is done booting and is responsive. If you haven't gotten CCleaner get the newest version and open it. First do a registry scan and fix. I only do registry scans after monthly windows updates or after any uninstalls or installs and upgrades. It is safe at the software defaults. Other programs that hype being great registry cleaners aren't. If they cause issues doing this it isn't CCleaner at fault.

 

Now here is the part that may speed you up just a few milliseconds more, safely. Click on CCleaner but before running it, scroll down to advanced, and check the box in front of "Old Prefetch data". Then run cleaner and if you use it daily like I do, uncheck Prefetch cleaning before closing CCleaner. See, on the next boot after deleting Prefetch, your computer, on boot, will take and extra 2 to 10 seconds to rebuild the Prefetch file. It is safe and it will do it every time so don't be alarmed when CCleaner warns that it is about to delete files. I check the box to not show me that again. As long as you do not change CCleaner's defaults, except for prefetch after a Windows update or uninstall, running CCleaner is safe.

 

Whenever you clean out Prefetch the next boot will be slower. I always restart three times after cleaning out prefetch. I've found a lot of folks that totally misunderstand it, and think when we say it slows it down for one boot think it just slows it down. I've seen that on the user forums on Microsoft! Total BS. Extra old Prefetch entries can slow down your boot but only needs to be done at most once a months and then you need to reboot twice or three times just to be sure you are back to a fully rebuilt Prefetch. Totally safe and will actually speed up a kludge bound computer when combined with cleaning up startup which you can also do easily from CCleaner: Just click tools on the left side menu, then click on startup, and then click on any entry, then click on the right menu to re-enable a startup item you earlier disabled, or you can disable one you know you do not need. Unless you are really familiar with each program being called up in startup, I strongly suggest you never delete one save for infections and you are working with Bleeping computers and are told to after running programs to upload the log files.

 

Then after all that, you are ready to time your boot on your old drive, and then clone it without that kludge still on the old drive. Keep the old drive for at least a month if you can just in case the clone needs to be redone. After that I would clone the new SSD system to the old hard drive monthly after Windows updates. That beats any image any day as it takes a little longer but can be swapped with a failed drive hard or Soli State, in just a few minutes and get another drive to replace the hard or SSD drive.

[Tom_M]

On my 5 year old Toshiba Portege with an i5 processor 4GB of memory running Windows 7 and a 1TB Samsung 5400 rpm hard drive my boot time was 90 seconds. With the Seagate 1TB 5400 rpm with 8GB flash memory my boot time dropped to 35 seconds. For the test I made an image of the Seagate drive and restored it to the Samsung drive so both had the same content. Boot time from hibernate was about 15 seconds for both drives.

 

Keep in mind that a hybrid drive will speed up boot times and perhaps the loading time for frequently used software. It will not speed up the time for doing file copies.