Let's take a look at some of the ways you can decrease your boot times without sacrificing reliability. New computers feels so fast out of the box because they don't have as many drivers to load on boot. As handy as they are, they breed drivers which slows down PC boot time. Even laptops provide three or four ports. That brings us today where new desktop PCs might come with as many as a dozen or more USB ports. All these new features and peripherals along with larger storage and memory capacities meant POST had more work to do. If not, the user will usually be presented with a BIOS error message. If everything tests OK, the computer will boot into the operation system. It determines if the keyboard, memory, drives and other hardware are working correctly. POST (Power-on Self-test) is the diagnostic sequence that runs when the computer is turned on. By 2000, we had computers with more peripherals attached to them, accommodating larger capacity drives and able to handle more memory. Memory checks run at POST took more time as well because Windows began utilizing larger chucks of memory. More physical drives meant more system checks on those drives at boot. Storage and memory manufactures created products to match these needs, but this also came at a cost of slow PC boot time. More Peripherals Prompt Slow PC Boot TimesEach new version of Windows included more features which required more storage. The downside to this was that each of these devices required drivers that needed to load into memory in order for Windows to recognize them at boot. USB made it infinitely more easier to connect keyboards, printers and external storage devices. Before USB, one had to work around the confusion of getting your devices recognized by parallel or serial ports. I mentioned Windows 95 as a turning point here because it marked an era where attaching devices to your computer became trivial. Much to the chagrin of DOS and MAC users, but Windows 95 really was a watershed moment for the PC. Windows 95 made computers approachable for the masses. USB arrived and made it easy to attach peripherals, which was both a blessing and a curse as we'll discuss. Intel was releasing new processors at the peak of Moore's Law, storage was increasing in capacity and performance, and gamers were driving AMD and NVIDIA to release fast dedicated graphics card to handle their increasingly complex games. Slow PC boot times seem like a problem we should have eradicated back around the time Windows 95 hit the streets to much fanfare and corny Jay Leno jokes. In order to reduce PC boot time, we need to delve deeper into the causes of the problem. Yet here we are in 2016 and slow boot times are one of the most popular user complaints. You might assume with the proliferation of speedy storage such as SSDs and fast Intel i7 processors that slow boot times would be as rare as a Zip Drive. There a better ways though, and in the following I will explore a few methods to reduce PC boot time. I once had a boss whose computer took so long to boot that he would come into the office, hit the power button, and then retreat to the break room for 20 minutes while the laptop took its own sweet time. Others refuse to apply any patches or updates that require a reboot.

I've spoken to owners who have created their own routines to deal with slow booting computers.

From the time you press the power button to the time your desktop appears feels almost magical if you've gotten used to painfully slow boot times. One of the best feelings that accompanies turning on a new computer for the first time is how quickly it boots.

Computer takes a long time to boot