The system starts taking longer each time it launches.
The system starts taking longer each time it launches.
Hello, I'm using Windows 10 Home on my machine and noticed it's taking longer to start each time. I built this system back in early 2018. Most of the time I keep it powered on, only shutting it down a couple of times weekly when I’m away from home (I work remotely). Over months I observed it having trouble powering off completely—screen faded but signals stayed active, and fans kept running. Eventually I resolved it by disabling fast startup in the power settings. It worked initially, then the boot time increased gradually, ranging from 5 to 20 minutes or more, with the Windows logo still visible. Around mid-2020, after not updating the OS (during a period when version 190X had known issues), a forced update occurred. This update resolved the boot slowness. However, after some time it slowed again, and I updated later in late 2021, which fixed the issue once more. My thought is that the problem might stem from corrupted or outdated files. Since Microsoft has moved away from Windows 10 to 11, permanent fixes are unlikely now. I’m unsure if a fresh installation would help, as I don’t want to risk losing my data or settings. I prefer avoiding system recovery because it could erase everything. The hardware specs are an AMD Ryzen 5 2400G with an Asus B350M-A motherboard, and the boot disk is a WD Green 120GB 2.5" drive.
is this device really that full? The smell you're noticing is similar to what people report on "win7 upgraded to win10" setups where old mechanical drives began to fail. Windows often performs a thorough cleanup after an update, which can help remove some of the clutter and improve performance. Try it out: launch cmd as administrator and run sfc /scannow for a quick scan. Then use cleanmgr (as admin) to clean up the disk, making sure all options are selected. Removing old restore points in cleanmgr might also help. If this noticeably improves your system's speed, it might be worth considering an SSD upgrade.
Not really, there's always around 10% of free space, and I always do disk cleanup a about week after every updates (just to make sure that the updates are stable). By the way, after boot into Windows, the OS works fine, programs are open snappily. I know how boot drive full is acting like, because sometime I accidently downloaded big files onto it, the OS wouldn't work as smooth as this. Even if right after big updated, and the free space in boot drive went down to only 7-8GB, the boot time still seconds. On the other hand, now it's around 10-15GB, it's worse.