If your computer takes forever to restart or for the login screen to appear, there are some possible causes for this. If your computer is old and has low specs systems, it can run slow and take forever to load and restart or not altogether. Let us know ‘Computer Taking Forever To Restart’.
Computer Taking Forever To Restart
Your computer taking forever to restart due to anything from a virus to a damaged operating system to a hardware fault, depending on the exact details it could be. To fix this, do a clean install (e.g., format the whole HDD) of your operating system, Install your anti-virus, reload your data, Re-install your commercial applications and lastly Re-install your non-commercial applications.
Three Steps You Can Follow to Diagnose and Fix Your Computer When It Takes Forever to Start?
- Clean your computer
- Windows Key + r > prefetch
- Windows Key + r > recent
- Windows Key + r > temp
- Windows Key + r > cleanmgr
- Windows Key + r > tree
Note: Must clean all files
- Disable all the unwanted startup services
Go to windows startup service & disable unwanted service
- Diagnose and Troubleshoot
Learn the order in which things appear on screen and notice if there are long periods when nothing seems to be happening that didn’t use to be there, as they’re pointers to what might be wrong.
If the problem seems to be real and you’re running Windows 10, open Windows Update and examine View Update History for pending and failed updates. Sometimes one with a problem (like 1703 a while ago) keeps retrying and failing on every start-up and shutdown.
There’s a Microsoft page of suggestions about particular problems but there are a few with specific updates you’ll need to search for individually, and sometimes the culprit is your security settings.
Computer Taking Forever to Restart – Reasons and Possible Fixes
if your computer is over 12 months old, it could be your Hard Drives.
A test would be to put a new Hard Drive with Windows 10 installed into your computer and see if the start-up and program times improve remarkably.
Your hard drives are divided up into Tracks and Sectors.
Sectors are like “pie slices” on the Tracks, and are marked with a “Sector Marker”
Heat and wear can make these “Sector Markers” hard to locate, and the drives will “retry” a failed seek up to a hundred times. The only way I know of to cure this is to use a System Repair Tool or Utility.
Ways You Can Use to Make PC Restart Quickly and Run More Smoothly?
- Use Light Weight Antivirus (meaning the antivirus which does not consume much memory.) If you are not using your computer for business purposes then use antivirus like Bit-defender, 360 securities etc.
Antivirus like Kaspersky, and MacAfee consumes high memory which makes computers slow. And when they expire then they become a Trojan virus which makes the computer much slower. So, if you have expired antivirus installed on your computer then go and uninstall it right now.
- Use Only One Browser at A Time. Browsers consume higher RAM. This is what happens when your browser runs out of memory
Especially, Google Chrome is a beast at consuming high RAMs. So, if your PC has low RAMs say 2GB or 4GB then when you use multiple browsers at the same time then most of that memory will be used by browsers which makes processing slower.
- Clean Up Your Disk Frequently. Go to Control panel>Administrative tools>Disk Clean up.
Disk Cleanup removes temporary files, removes junk and makes a computer a bit faster.
It’s recommended you clean your main drive once a month.
- Restart Computer When You Feel the Processing Speed Being Slower.
- Use genuine windows.
- Don’t install unnecessary extensions on your browser.
- Don’t put unsafe pen drives/USBs on your PC.
- Don’t install many third-party high-held apps, programs and games if your PC has low RAM.
- If you are using a mechanical HDD then upgrading to SSD will help a lot (even more so if you have an M.2 port in there).
- If upgrading isn’t an option and you’re running Windows you should check what is running in the background.
- For Linux you might want to look at recompiling the kernel if you are using one of the default setups as they will often probe for practically every possible piece of hardware on boot whereas a custom-built one can be set to only load drivers (either built-in or as modules) for the hardware you have installed.
Reasons Why Your Computer Is Slow at Start-Up and How You Can Fix?
During the initial boot, the BIOS/UFI will go through a memory check. The more memory you have, the longer it takes (about 30 seconds for 8GB – but that is a guestimate). The BIOS/UFI may have an option to do a base scan rather than a full read/write test (MUCH faster).
Once the kernel is loaded – it is up to your OS. Linux systems have booted in under 30 seconds, regardless of the updates applied, or the distribution. Granted, some distributions (like fedora) will start a ton of things in the background – but you don’t have to wait for them. Starting a GUI does take time after login (some of the GUI desktops take up a LOT of memory that has to be loaded) after a boot. But the second login for the same environment is about half that first time (thanks to disk caching, and a good bit of memory). Picking a good GUI can be tricky and it depends on a lot of personal preferences. Mate is preferred Mate, Gnome is HUGE, but LXDE is much faster than both – and there are faster ones available; it just depends on how much hand-holding you prefer.
For Windows, it takes a good bit of third-party software to keep the viruses down to a tolerable level (it can never keep them all away, and scans are slow), disk fragmentation is still an issue (something solved by the UNIX group around 1985), and the GUI is still severely inefficient.
What Microsoft is now calling “boot” is closer to a “hibernate”. Don’t confuse the two – as you can get a lot of painful disk corruption doing a cold boot when Microsoft says “boot”. A cold boot where a “restore from hibernation” is meant causes the system to not save buffers that may have been modified. When that happens, the system will boot VERY slowly while it tries to recover.
Steps To Take When a Laptop Becomes Slow or Unresponsive?
Check your Resource Monitor Resource Monitor – Wikipedia. Choose Start→Type to search “Resource Monitor” (without the quotes). Then, same as before, you can choose which applications to stop stealing resources.
Possible Causes If Computer Takes Forever for The Login Screen to Appear
There are two main causes. How old is your laptop? Old, low-spec systems can still manage to run Windows 10.
The second cause is typically overheating. Do you hear fan sounds from the laptop? If not, your system is being throttled down to avoid heat damage… OR… a sensor has gone bad and the system thinks that it’s overheating.
Unless it’s the really old issue discussed above, take it to a local technician for evaluation.
How To Fix It?
Depending on the exact details it could be anything from a virus to a damaged operating system to a hardware fault.
- Do a clean install (e.g., format the whole HDD) of your operating system.
- Install your anti-virus.
- Reload your data.
- Re-install your commercial applications.
- Repeat #c.
- Re-install your non-commercial applications.
- Repeat #c.
- Download and install Spybot S&d from a trusted source.
Total startup time: 92 seconds
Running on his new SSD, it should take at most 9 seconds to get to the login screen and an additional 7 seconds for it to load the desktop and finish starting up
Conclusion
Aside from the usual Anti-Virus/Malware scans and defragmenting of your HDD, when your computer taking forever to restart, fix it by going to Task Manager (Windows) – Wikipedia by pressing Ctrl + Alt + Delete clicking “Start Task Manager” (without the quotes) to see where your resources are being utilized to. If you’re familiar with this, you can stop unnecessary functions to free resources.
Frequently Asked Questions
My PC now takes almost 5 minutes to start up after getting accidentally turned off twice. Any ideas on how to fix this?
Any HDD or SSD if nearly full – such as 90% or higher – may boot slowly regardless of how many times you cycle it. It requires some free space to operate at all times. Clear your RAM.
My Laptop Is Taking Too Much Time to Start I Have a Windows 10, What Is the Problem?
Windows 10 is a powerful operating system, but there are a lot of problems and issues that the users of Windows10 have reported. Windows slow boot and startup are one such issue. this issue is fixable by using Anti-Virus/Malware scans and defragmenting your HDD.
