Is my Alienware 15 R2 supposed to be this slow on boot?

investing in a good SSD is a good idea. usually, i would say get Samsung SSD, but i saw too many people on this forum with complains about 850 EVO lately. my second choice is always Crucial for SATA SSDs and Corsair for M2 SSDs.

do you have 3rd Party Anti-Virus software installed?

Hi, 

Which Bios version are you running with the system?

Hi Rodrigo. Thanks for the reply - I'm running Alienware 1.2.15 apparently.

PS: Do you think I should cancel the Samsung 960 EVO and order a Corsair one? I can cancel/return my order if so.

Hi CBL, thanks for the reply. I've actually ordered earlier today a Samsung 960 EVO, hopefully that does better than the 850! =/ I logged my boot times, took over 5 mins to load Photoshop, and even after 7 mins was still at 100% disk usage doing various tasks.

I've not got a 3rd party anti-virus installed, was annoyed by all the popups. However today I've tried disabling Windows Defender as related tasks seemed to hog CPU on boot (I've also tried disabling telemetry options). Those things seem to have knocked off a little from boot times (but still taking way too long hence my ordering an SSD, oh and an extra 8GB RAM too!).

Yes, you should get a SSD.

No, even a spinning HDD should not take 5 minutes to boot. However, with just a spinner ... maybe 3 minutes after BIOS Posts is to be expected.

How long does it take to boot and for all your 10-15 "Task Tray" items to appear? At that point, Windows should be useable.

In Task Manager ...

- You only have 120-140 or so Processes running, right?

- Memory usage around 15-30%, right?

- Lets say 10 minutes after you boot ... at idle desktop ... CPU usage is under 5%, right?

Sounds like you might have virus, spyware, HDD is failing, and/or your Windows is corrupt or compromised.

Have you done a Windows Error Check on all your drives?

answer my questions above. Also, install "Portable" versions of Crystal Disk-Info and Disk-Mark. Run and post screenshots.

http://crystalmark.info/download/index-e.html

oh. didn't see your first reply.

Tesla suggested to download CrystalDiskInfo. i think it is a good idea. it will show you the current health status of your HDD.

and i would suggest to download Malware Bytes, install it and check the entire System. it might be infected by Trojan Virus or something like that. this stuff is not funny at all. one of my clients catched one. it was a nightmare.

Edit:

Fixed My Post.

i honestly don't know. you can try to install the Samsung 960 EVO, but like i said i saw atleast two different people here who could not boot from the Samsung 850 EVO SSD but the 960 EVO is not 850 EVO, so it might work.

make sure you have the latest BIOS version installed. it will likely improove the compatibility.

Hi Tesla,

It's only taking around 40 seconds to load Windows and the taskbar, however it chugs along, and at around 2:08 the taskbar appears and disappears. In Task Manager it seems disk is 100% until around 3:10 mark then it goes to 0-1% (during the previous time it seems to be antimalware service executable, service host that hog the most). I've done a test loading Photoshop from cold and it's a new record at 3:30 before it's usable, so that's better than it's ever been, but still feels a fair while for this machine.

I've done Windows Error Check - no errors.

I've done the CrystalMark tests, images below.

(Also done Malware bytes scan, all clear, thx for tip CBL).

Thx for help

Yes, a 3 minute Windows boot is about right for a spinning HDD. All my machines here have SSD boot drives now. You are going to love SSD. Not just transfer speed but IOPS.

I still wonder if something is not quite right. Maybe your scheduled weekly Defrag got turned off? Maybe a startup process that is suppose to be "delayed startup" isn't any more cause parallel loading or head thrashing.

Those pics surprisingly look ok. Speed it not bad for a spinner and SMART is fine.

As for Photoshop's "slow loading" ... lots of verified working tips here:

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1839835

it is probably how the HDD works. i see 32 MB Buffer. average for Windows Boot Device.

have you received your SSD yet?

I had Alienware R2 17" that came with no SSD but w/ 1TB 5400rpm HD, same happened to me w/ slow booting 60s, taking mins. to open Photoshop, Autocad. Then I bought a SSD M2 stick (SATA), after speed check it reads/writes 500mb/s and it's far better than 1TB HD. Boot @ 25-40s but realized it's not enough and went for SSD PCI-E X4 stick but won't work in R2 version. I consult some IT guys the latest R3-R4 supported PCI-E x4 and booted like 8-10s and reads/write @ least 2000mb/1500mb.

Hope this might be helpful. Cheers!

Your operating system should be on your M.2 (which is an SSD) so I'm wondering what size is your M.2 and how much free space is left on the drive?

The current version of BIOS is 1.3.10 so updating may help. The have been a few BIOS updates from yours so be sure to install each version in order until you get to 1.3.10.

Your computer has SupportAssist that can test a variety of components and software. You may want to look into SupportAssist on you computer. 

Hi CBL,

Well today I received and installed my Samsung 960 EVO SSD, and am happy to report that my 5 minute boot/load time has gone down to 58 seconds - from pressing the powerpoint to fully loaded and using Photoshop in under a minute. Excellent!

Good to hear it worked.
 
Yeah, not sure why they even ship computers without SSDs as boot drives (or did it for so long). I know ... to save a few dollars but performance is like night-and-day.

As for your boot and load times ... sounds about right since even a SATA-3/600 based SSD is 4-6 times faster than a spinning drive. PCIe-based SSD is even many times faster than that.