Measure before you touch anything
Open Event Viewer, go to Applications and Services Logs > Microsoft > Windows > Diagnostics-Performance > Operational, and look at event ID 100. It records the duration of every boot, so you can compare before and after each change instead of trusting how the spinner felt.
The number also tells you where to look: thirty seconds spent before the login screen points at firmware and drivers; minutes spent after login point at startup applications. The nine fixes below split cleanly between those two worlds.
Six changes that cost nothing
These are ordered by payoff on the machines we checked. The first two alone account for most of the "my PC got slow" complaints we see.
- Prune the Startup apps list in Task Manager — sort by startup impact and disable everything you did not deliberately install
- Check both Startup folders and the Task Scheduler tasks that fire at logon — launchers love re-adding themselves there
- Turn on Fast Startup in Control Panel > Power Options — with the caveat that it upsets dual-boot setups and some USB devices
- Give heavy-but-needed tools a delayed start via Task Scheduler instead of letting them fight at boot
- In UEFI firmware, enable fast boot and make the NVMe drive the first boot device — network and optical probes add seconds
- Update chipset and storage drivers — an NVMe drive on a generic driver gives away real speed
Two upgrades and one habit
If boot time still matters after all that, the hardware answer is unambiguous: moving Windows from a hard drive to an SSD is the single change that reliably halves boot time, and no amount of tweaking a mechanical disk matches it. The free upgrade is a habit — keep the startup list short, because every reinstall simply restores whatever you allowed to auto-start.
And the ninth change is refusing the popular one: reinstalling Windows does not fix boot time, because a fresh install with the same fifty startup programs boots the same. The list was the problem; the rot was never rot.
Questions and Answers
How do I check my boot time in Windows?
Event Viewer, under Diagnostics-Performance > Operational, logs every boot as event ID 100 with its duration in milliseconds. Task Manager's startup impact column shows the per-app cost.
Should Fast Startup be on or off?
On, for most single-OS machines — it skips re-initializing drivers at boot. Turn it off if you dual-boot another OS or wake up to missing USB devices, since it keeps a hybrid hibernation image.
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