Why on startup? Windows startup is already so painfully slow, especially compared to Apple silicon machines, and adding Office to it would only compound this problem. I think this problem can be avoided, while also still helping pre-load Office, if Windows just detects when resource utilization is low and loads Office in the background then.
> When Startup Boost is active, the scheduled task will not run immediately at login to avoid slowing down your PC — it will wait 10 minutes to ensure the system is in a steady idle state. Additionally, Startup Boost will be disabled when Energy Saver mode is active. Startup Boost only runs if you have launched Word recently, and if you have not launched Word recently it will automatically disable itself.
If you meet the hardware requirements threshold and recently have used Office then preloading it 10 minutes after login is extremely unlikely to impact your startup.
That makes me wonder how many corporate office drones start an Office app within 10 minutes of logging in, because this feature would be useless for them.
Recently needed windows for a single piece of software (I hate myself for it) and used a PC I had around (dell Wyse 5070) manjaro Linux Bootet in about 9 seconds.
Windows 10 on the other hand takes nearly a minute to get to login and it hasn't stopped booting then, another 20 seconds or so after login it's not responsive.
And only if it doesn't decide to update or do system repairs for 5 minutes, or more if it goes into one if it's restart update loops.
It's not a little more, it literally killed at least an hour of productivity in just a few weeks
(That's not counting the productivity killers once the system is running)
I don’t like Windows. And it is baffling to me that startup speed is a figure-of-merit nowadays given how absurdly fast drives have gotten.
With those caveats aside, I must unfortunately acknowledge that Windows startup is perfectly fine (Linux is faster, but again this competition is pointless. Unless you are some compute infrastructure supplier and need to boot a million VMs a day or whatever).
Sometimes when people post with baffling Windows performance problems, it is because their experience comes from corporate laptops with some mandatory spyware from IT.
No... it's not fine. I don't reboot all the time for work or run a zillion VMs, I'm just a regular user. But sometimes when I'm rebooting - I need to get to necessary information quickly. Waiting 40+ seconds is an eternity when standing at an airport immigration counter pulling up a pre-filed form that they said I did not need to bring but which they're now demanding (because their machines are rebooting).
I'm glad you feel it's fine for you. Not all of us agree. I'm especially annoyed because much of the new bloat slowing my life down during startup is stupid and unnecessary shit I don't even use much (or ever) - like initializing CoPilot, Edge, and now, Office.
Note: I even upgraded my SSD to an expensive Samsung 990 Pro, reportedly one of the fastest available. It's still >40 secs - and I've already gone through and thoroughly pruned all the unnecessary services, tasks and autoruns that I can. It's a top of the line >$3000 laptop that's less than a year old.
Weirdly for me I don't have much trouble with startup, but shutting down windows seems to take an impossibly long time, especially on my work laptop. Like several minutes. Probably some misbehaving program and maybe not windows' fault, but I have no idea what it's doing just sitting there at the final screen after its killed all remaining tasks for eternity.
Something is wrong with your computer if it takes 40 seconds, I have a similar samsung SSD and it takes like 20 seconds maximum from a cold boot to desktop on Win11
> Something is wrong with your computer if it takes 40 seconds
Yes, he just said it, it has Windows on it.
But more to the point: Windows slow boot has been a constant ever since the times when I would boot up Windows ME and go make myself a tea. If anything, Windows has always stayed one step of the technology that would bring its boot times down, to the point where I'd guess (as this article suggests) that it's company policy to dump slow components there.
Yeah my ~1000€ Lenovo Yoga 7 Pro takes 18 seconds from cold boot(power button press) to signed in via windows hello. And that's with Bitlocker and myself having installed a whole bunch of background utilities.
Probably a corporate machine vs personal desktop divide. My corporate windows laptop has so much security/keylogger/spyware crap that time to unlock is ridiculous.
I just timed it, my personal Mac takes 10s to the login screen and then 4 seconds to the desktop after putting in my password. My work Mac takes 3+ min. All of the endpoint monitoring stuff they put on there really takes its toll.
My windows gaming PC starts up in about 30s from a cold boot (though it's not encrypted...), so I would at least put the personal Mac and the Windows machine in the same ballpark. I couldn't have told you which one is faster without timing it. The work machine laptop is clearly noticeably slower.
If you measured with a stop watch I'm sure it would take more than 2 seconds but to be accurate it is perceptibly brief whereas others startup is perceptibly to them slow. Why?
When fast startup is enabled shutting down does a reboot and then a hibernate so that it can wake up from hibernate when you start up but with the same effect as a fresh start. This is generally much faster than a full startup. This should and in many cases must be disabled to dual boot another OS.
Different hardware takes longer to initialize which may delay startup. This is especially true of failing hardware which may whilst in bad shape continue to work after a fashion but take far longer to initialize.
The answer is a definite maybe because some hardware will keep state when hibernated and will be unusable if this isn't disabled. For instance the WiFi won't work in the other OS. Also sooner or later you are going to need a file you received on windows or indeed on any fs mounted on windows.
Because.. it’s slow. My team used to do VDI engineering. We could reduce boot times by 30% with optimized and tweaked out configurations, but it was still slower than my out of the box MacBook Air.
I think the way macOS and Windows loads stuff after login is a bit different though.
Since most macOS installations use FileVault by default, the login screen looks like it loads only stuff related to the login screen and not anything from the OS. Windows on the other hand, seems to load more stuff in the spinning thingy screen that appears before the login screen.
For instance, if you disable Filevault on macOS, the OS seems to load before the login screen, and then when you input your login and password, it loads to the desktop instantly. That would be a better comparison to a Windows machine, I think.
That said, I am not sure if this is how things really works, but that's how it looks like to work for me. Sorry if I spread any misinformation here :)
That would be an implementation deficiency. If Windows can be FDE and load faster than macOS, then the way macOS has implemented the FDE solution is suboptimal, if startup time is your primary measurement.
I personally don't have issues with startup times on my M2 Air or 5800X3D/Win11, both encrypted.
The way File Vault works nowadays, as I understand it, is that your user data (and maybe even much of the OS) isn't decrypted until you've put in your password on the login screen. This means that even if you devised a way to hijack the login screen, or sniff the keys coming out of the secure enclave, you'd still be stuck without the user's login password.
Windows, by contrast, unlocks the entire OS drive before you get to the login screen. So, a hypothetical login screen hijack would let you get to everything, or cold boot attacks/sniffing keys coming from the TPM to the CPU.
I'd argue the macOS version is better from a security aspect, but it has a necessary downside of being unable to load as much before the user can put in their password.
I don't know what is different on your system, but my Windows startup experience is that it's blazing fast. Granted, that's on a gaming rig with a decent CPU and it's Windows 10, not 11, but I don't remember having to do any custom de-shittification and it boots way faster than Linux, short enough to not really perceive the boot process as an interruption.
That's funny cuz my Linux boot up is so fast that multiple coworkers and even my girlfriend have commented on how much faster it is than their windows installs.
Linux is blazing fast when configured properly. But in reality we're talking about 2-3 seconds of difference here. How long a machine takes to POST is usually the biggest part of bootup nowadays.
