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How fast does your Windows PC start? – I challenge you to a boat duel!
Admittedly, in times of modern operating systems such as Windows 10 and Windows 11 and fast data carriers such as SSDs, the boot process fortunately takes significantly less time than it used to. But there are still small differences. Reason enough to take a closer look together!
My own work and gaming PC, which is not based on the very latest and fastest hardware, but still feels fast when booting, serves as a reference value. As you can also see in the video above, it takes me just over 21 seconds from pressing the start button to booting into Windows and opening the customization settings.
Why this extra step in the measurement? To ensure that the PC is really ready for use and responds to inputs sufficiently quickly. What’s the point of looking at the desktop if so much has to be loaded in the background that Windows only implements my commands with a delay? The appropriate survey for your boot time under Windows 10 or Windows 11 follows here:
My hardware and general information
How fast a PC boots depends on the operating system and its status as well as the hardware used. The data medium used is particularly important. An SSD with a fast flash memory boots much faster than an HDD with magnetic discs. The second biggest influence is the CPU.
My own PC is a few years older, as can be seen from the name of the system in the video at the beginning of the article: It’s called Mini-ITX 12-18
so the computer is from December 2018. It contains the following basic components:
- Processor: Intel Core i5 8600K
- Windows-SSD: Samsung SSD 960 Pro 512 GB (NVMe, PCIe 3.0)
- Random access memory: 16.0 GB DDR4-3600
- Graphic card: Geforce RTX 2080 Super
- Operating system: Windows 11
In order to speed up the Windows boot time and generally keep the operating system as slim as possible, you should clean up the autostart from time to time. You can find it in the task manager (accessible via right-click on the taskbar or the key combination Ctrl+Shift+ESC).
The following article offers you more tips for cleaning up Windows 10, most of which also apply to Windows 11:
Clean Windows: This is how you clean up your system properly
Exactly how long does it take on your PC before you can open the display settings in Windows? And do you regularly clean up your autostart and other areas of the PC so that it starts faster again and generally runs smoother? Feel free to write it in the comments!
