Win 10 load-time disparity

The 11" laptop diagnostics report no issues.

Fast Startup is enabled in power options.

No event viewer errors and, yes, the behavior is the same on restart or cold boot.

No hybrid or SSD designation on either box.

Appreciated your prompt and thoughtful response.

Some possible causes off the top of my head:

- A service that takes too long to start for some reason, even if it's an appropriate service to have on the system. This would be tricky to identify unless you see Event Viewer entries about long start times that might implicate it.

- One or more drivers taking a long time to start.  These two systems use completely different hardware, after all, and the slower system might have more drivers total to load due to having more hardware built-in that requires drivers.

- Windows 8 and up hibernates the kernel (not the whole system) on shutdown by default, but maybe one system isn't doing that.  However, this does NOT occur on restarts.  Do you observe this disparity even on boots that immediately follow a restart, or only on boots from a cold shutdown?

- Does one of those hard drives happen to be a "hybrid" drive that has an SSD cache built into it? That would dramatically accelerate the performance of that disk.  They're called SSHDs, or solid state hybrid drives. Otherwise, some Dell systems that ship with spinning drives also ship with a separate mSATA SSD chip and use a technology called Intel Smart Response to achieve this same caching behavior across two physically separate devices.

- Differences in the health of the hard drives. A tool like SpinRite would show you if the slower system's disk is bogging down trying to re-read certain sectors over and over again (and try to fix it by relocating that data to good sectors), but that tool isn't free and I don't know of any free tools that perform the same function.

I'll post more ideas if I come up with any.

Hmm, was really hoping that the SSHD or mSATA cache was the answer since that's a large disparity and you having looked through Autoruns before posting ruled out several possible causes that I would otherwise have suggested -- gold star for using that, btw! :)

System-wide diagnostic applications won't perform full surface sector tests on a disk, though.  Like I said, SpinRite is the only tool I know of that does what it does, but I admit it's an expensive proposition just for ruling out a possible variable.  Its operation has however made it known for recovering drives after they fail to boot or are even identified by the PC as dead, at least long enough to allow people to recover data off of them (usually people who never backed anything up....), just in case you might ever have a need for such a tool.

Depending on how much time and inclination you have to get to the bottom of this, you could always try a fresh Win10 install on the slow system to see how much anything improves. You could even use a tool like Macrium Reflect Free to capture an image of that system beforehand so that you can restore it back to its current state if the rebuild turns out not to improve anything.  If you do this, make sure you hold off your benchmark until you've installed the system's full complement of drivers.

SpinRite will be on my memory back burner. ^_^

Several fresh installs - one recent - didn't alter the behavior.

The system has been imaged, both by the built-in Wi10 utility and by Terabyte's Image for Windows.

As it is rarely rebooted, this isn't a priority issue - more a curiosity annoyance.

Gracias