Looking for some tech advice

[Hyomoto]

I have an Alienware 15 R2 I recently purchased.  I put my own 500GB SSD into it because as most people know Alienware is stupidly overpriced, and in this case the 500GB SSD upgrade is 500$ (already high) but I got mine on Black Friday for 130$ on Amazon.  Side note, the Samsung EVO 850 500GB do go on sale from time to time, I pretty much pick one up every time they do.  Back on topic, I used Arcronis True Image 2015 to duplicate the drive, installed it in the computer and booted it up.  I'm pretty used to SSD's by now, definitely used to this operation, and I'd consider myself generally pretty qualified to work on and tinker with my own systems, so I expected an immediate improvement in boot times—but there was literally none.  It took the exact same time as the platter drive.

So here's the wierdness: and I can honestly say this is a first.  It turns out there IS a huge difference.  If I go from a cold boot, it takes less than five seconds to come up.  That is, if I go to Power > Shut Down, when I next turn it on it is stupidly fast coming up.  It's so fast I thought I had left it in sleep the first time it happened.  Awesome, right?  Exactly how I like it.  Well, not entirely, because when I do a restart it still takes 30 seconds to a minute?  First world problem to be sure, but I cannot fathom why this is happening.  At first I thought it was just windows installing updates, and in many ways I still do because this happens when it does, but generally speaking if I cold boot, I get the Alienware logo and then the desktop.  If I hit restart, I get the Alienware logo, then the spinning circle and then the desktop.  And that spinning circle is apparently where the time difference is.

I've entertained the idea that maybe it's not actually off, but hibernating or sleeping, which I honestly suppose it could but I'm choosing Shut Down.  I also have a Surface Pro 3 which normally just sleeps but when it does have to be powered on it takes no longer than a regular restart.  And lastly, as far as I can tell, my Asus G752VT ALSO doesn't have this problem, it's definitely local to this laptop and this one situation.  So I'm really looking for anyone who has experience, useful not complaints, with Alienware or Windows 10 that might be able to provide some insight on this.  I'm sure it can be fixed, I'm not sure if anyone that reads this would be able to help but if you've experienced something like this before I'd appreciate the help.

[Waxing_Kibbous]

Does Windows do updates on restart? That would be my only guess. From what I hear Win10 does a bit of stuff behind the scenes.

Anyhow, I always get a kick out of optimizing boot times, how often are people starting their machines up that seconds matter so much

[steve_v]

1 hour ago, Waxing_Kibbous said:

Anyhow, I always get a kick out of optimizing boot times, how often are people starting their machines up that seconds matter so much

Yeah, those few seconds are real precious to me, I restart my desktop about once a month, and servers only when I absolutely have to, total time saved: not worth counting.
If it's not Windows being Windows and doing mystery stuff on shutdown, I'd start with finding out (and eliminating one at a time) anything that's running before you restart - my only guess is that some AlienWare bundled er... stuff is doing something on reboot.
 

[cantab]

I think your conclusion that it's not really shutting down is correct.

[Hyomoto]

Windows definitely does it's updates on restart.  And if I have updates to do, even the cold boot will take longer and I'll get the wheel.  But that's really why it's so strange is that if there are no updates to do, the cold boot is full afterburner while a restart is still slow.  As a comparison, I have an Asus G550JK with Windows 7 on it.  My boot times there are about 10 seconds, and so are my restart times.

I know Windows 10 has a lot of new architecture, it has 'fast startup' which I need to read up more on.  And ... done.  So yes, the whole idea is that Windows 10 will take a snapshot of your drivers and services on shut down so next time you turn it on it doesn't have to start them, it just reads the file it made.  That definitely explains the blisteringly fast cold boot and why it doesn't happen on restart, but it doesn't explain, then, why the boot is so slow to begin with.  My Surface Pro is putting my laptop to shame on this one and that's not a good look.  I tried doing a clean boot and that hacked about ten seconds off, but that's pushing it down to 127 seconds according to the event viewer.  I turns out I had a 17 second boot time back on the first of November ... what has changed ...

Edited December 6, 2015 by Hyomoto

[Stone Blue]

1 hour ago, Hyomoto said:

 I tried doing a clean boot and that hacked about ten seconds off, but that's pushing it down to 127 seconds according to the event viewer.  I turns out I had a 17 second boot time back on the first of November ... what has changed ...

How much data have you added to your hardrive?.... It could be anti-virus software taking longer to scan your HDD... ???
I know I have my 500GB HDD 3/4 full, and I tweaked a couple settings on Avast to scan deeper on boot-up, and now my Win8 takes about 5 mins to boot, until I can actually open anything...

PS- Thanks for the KSI UHF Blade Antenna...I'm still using it in 1.0.5... lol

[Hyomoto]

You too?  Me too!  Although the texture is messed up and I never bothered fixing it   Anyways, it's not anti-virus because I don't use anti-virus.  However, I did do some tests.  My Surface Pro 3 boots and restarts at pretty much the same speed, but my G752VT is also a slow boot.  It's showing as about 10 seconds slower, but unless Windows 10 is making abysmal use of my SSD I should certainly be seeing more than a 10 second improvement on boot times.  This makes me feel a little better because it doesn't seem isolated to the Alienware specifically, I'm guessing now it must be some service(s) that are taking a long time to boot.  Probably the, ahem, analytics processes.  If I had to wager a guess.