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Laptop needs a very long time to boot up

How long should it normally take?

On current models with Windows installed on SSD, the cold boot and wake from hibernate should not take much longer than 12 seconds between pressing the power button and the login screen appearing. If the laptop takes significantly longer, we offer the following tips.

Enable "Fast Boot"

Enabling "Fast Boot" in the BIOS is a prerequisite for using Microsoft's "Hybrid Boot" technology, which saves a lot of time during cold boot. We enable "Fast Boot" in all XMG laptops before delivery - but it can happen that this feature is disabled by the user. On a certain model (XMG FUSION 15), it can also be disabled during a BIOS reset. To make sure that "Fast Boot" is enabled, please perform the following steps in the BIOS setup:

  • Open the [Exit] menu and confirm [Restore Defaults], but do not reboot yet.
  • Navigate to the [Boot] menu and select [Boot Priority].
  • Search [Fast Boot] and set it to [Enabled].
  • Back in the [Exit] menu, select [Save Changes and Exit], which will reboot the system.

(the position of the "Fast Boot" option in the BIOS setup may slightly differ depending on the model)

Update firmware (and double flash if necessary)

The boot process can be roughly divided into BIOS time and Windows time. The time the system spends in the state before the XMG boot logo and the small Windows loading circle appear for the first time is BIOS time. On XMG FUSION 15, for example, it usually takes about 7 seconds between pressing the power button and the first appearance of the XMG boot logo. If this time span is significantly longer on your laptop, the cause could be in the hardware or firmware.

Examples from practice:

  • User already had a system with Thunderbolt firmware NVM v56. But based on a hunch, he simply tried updating the same firmware again, and that immediately fixed the long BIOS time (source).
  • Later, Thunderbolt firmware NVM v62 further reduced boot time for certain edge cases, including certain docking stations (source).

Clean up TEMP folder

Taken from this post:

"Found out, during each boot Windows (namely it's ProfSvc service) takes everything you have in users/yourprofile folder and writes over those files. I suspect it's changing some meta data in the files. Probably edditing read/write premissions. But it goes one by one. And logon process waits for it to finish. As long as your computer is relatively clean, this operation takes a second or two. But when Visual Studio update "forgets" 160 000 files in your AppData/Temp folder, it results in 35 secs of profile loading during boot. All I needed was to empty the Temp folder and the bootups are back in normal!"

You can either empty the temp folders manually or use a software like CCleaner. Please note that we recommend CCleaner only for Temp folder cleanup, not for Windows Registry cleanup. The latter may have unexpected side effects in some circumstances. Deleting temp folders with CCleaner, on the other hand, is quite safe.

Riot Games "Vanguard' may block a driver

If you have installed games from Riot Games, the "Vanguard" software may block the "inpoutx64.sys" driver on some of our systems. This driver is related to the Control Center. We know of cases where the presence of Vanguard led to a significantly prolonged boot time.

Consider clean reinstallation

It may be inconvenient, but in cases of very long boot times with unclear cause, you might also want to consider a clean Windows installation. "Clean" means that the system partitions on the SSD are deleted in the first step of the installation process. Before that, you should of course create a backup of all important data on another data medium.