Dell XPS 13 9350 boot time slow

I have this exact problem on my XPS 13 9360. There's a good 10-15 second delay between pressing the power button and the Windows logon screen appearing. My old Samsung Ultrabook did this instantaneously. This is nothing to do with applications/programs/services starting in Windows - this is clearly a UEFI issue. Dell have been hopeless in troubleshooting and have suggested I return the laptop for them to analyse it. I asked them to time an out-of-the-box XPS 13 9360 for comparison before I waste my time doing this but they refused. You'd think they'd have lab laptops for such things. It would be nice if there was a way to debug UEFI to verify...

Disable Secure Boot in the UEFI and see if you get an improvement. Secure Boot is supposed to monitor for potential damaging hardware/software issues, and maybe it sees something it doesn't like.

There are some strange things happening to me that may be related to BIOS issues. My I660 (EUFI BIOS)) used to boot to and through the Dell Logo in several seconds. All of a sudden several weeks back, it booted to the Dell logo and then took about 30 seconds to get past the Logo. I tried a lot of things with no success. Then I booted one day, and boom, through the Logo fast; I really didn't change anything to cause the improvement. Then, after upgrading to Win 10 Creators Edition last month, it was taking almost 10 seconds to get to the Dell Logo, but then proceeded OK. This stuff drives me nuts! I also thought it was the EUFI, but when I first upgraded to Win 10 two years ago, both the I660 and my ASUS T100 tablet (no EUFI) booted to the Desktop in 10-12 seconds total. The I660 has been all over the map, but the ASUS is still at 10-12 seconds. I may try disabling Secure Boot myself on the I660.

Some annoyingly bad suggestions/questions on here - installed Windows programs and browser have nothing to do with this problem - it's before Windows even starts loading. I have the same issue with my 9360 - it takes about 5 seconds for the Dell logo to appear and 20 seconds to get to the Windows logon. I experience the same when resuming from a hibernated Windows session. If I disable UEFI and boot to a legacy BIOS bootable USB Ubuntu, it takes 5 seconds for the Dell logo to appear and 16 seconds to get to the Ubuntu GRUB menu. It's that initial 5 second lag that I find the most frustrating/perplexing thing - *** is it doing for that long?! Are there any Dell XPS 13 9360 owners who don't experience this delay?

I have seen to different Dell 9360 and they both have a post time of 7 seconds. I talked to Dell support about this and they tell me that this is by design and there is nothing they can do.

I think it's such a shame on this otherwise perfect laptop.

I'm having the same issue. Just bought this laptop less than a week ago... And now are having second thoughts on keeping in as for the same price I can get a mac air book (which I've had in the past) and haven't ever had any issues with it. Wanted to give Windows 10 a chance, but this is really annoying (besides the default Mcafee notifications and popoups that came with it!)   :(

One thing we need to make known.  When booting from powered down may have a different boot time that from a restart.  So make sure an state which is being discussed.

Past that, a delay can be caused by different reasons and may be related to pre-Windows or Windows drivers/access.

You can set msconfig.exe to do a boot log to see if it is prior to Win 10.  Such things as drivers which are not installing correctly could be involved.

If the slow times are related to Windows, it might be a bad driver or something being accessed, such as external devices, network locations or even network connections.

I would remove any external devices and boot without a network connection.  If it makes a difference then you are close to the problem.  You can check the Task Manger and look at the startup tab.  Does it show a reasonable time, which means in the less than 20 seconds..

None of my systems take more than about 15 seconds to reach the lock screen, depending if they are coming out of Hibernation, which can occur 30 minutes after the display turns off, to a clean boot.

Also, when it boots, does it ask for a password or other sign in options?

It's not a Windows 10 or driver related issue. It's POST time (UEFI), before Windows 10 starts loading.

@MrBoon I have owned the Dell XPS 13 (9350/2016) iris 540 model since earlier this year around March 19th, I got the QHD Touchscreen/i7-6560u/16g ram/512gb SSD.NVMe.M.2 - my laptop was running phenomenal for about 3 month's, and I think I just got trigger-happy with my downloads, which caused my computer to slowly-but-surely slow down over that time-frame. I started tweaking the settings, and changing the way software/programs load - sure enough, my PC started to sloowwwww down to nearly 4-5x its average speed, I'm talking slow-app launch's, double-sometimes-TRIPLE re-boot/boot-up time, and my daily-use was starting to cause the computer to freeze from time to time. long story short, it was absolutely ridiculous what I had done to my system, I was extremely upset with set-up and started to get discouraged with it... and then I looked into running a fresh-install of the windows 10 operating system;

This changed the whole experience for me on my PC, its only been 24 hours since this change took-place, but I am already seeing a 200% turn-around in computer performance.. !!! It's amazing to me how well this laptop is now performing, I cant believe how much of a difference the system-install of windows 10 (clean-install) has made on my device, its really eye-popping to think that I had done so much to hinder the performance of this beautiful machine, really surprised at that. Although we are talking about a laptop that I have continually used almost literally 24/7 for 120 days straight - I haven't used a computer this much since I was a kid, back when I was addicted to playing this video game called Diablo 2 (expansion set for those wondering) on battle.net !! - I don't even play video games anymore, I just love being on this computer, the look, feel, and real-high-performance feel of the system is like that of being in love --> euphorically speaking LOL

I personally mean no offence to Dell, and what they do, because they are really a great manufacturer and have a wonderful tech-team that's thorough in what they do - BUT, I am a firm believer that the way this computer was shipped out to me (speaking on the software that came installed on it when I turned the PC on) speaking specifically about all of the dell software and programs/apps BY dell that were put there to supposedly "help with performance", I personally believe that this is the real culprit behind my device acting up and for its behavior-(performance-wise)- including slow-boot times, lagging, freezing, and losing snappiness over time.

so what I'm getting at here is, you have definetley done the right thing by doing a fresh-install of windows on your xps 13 9350, and I wish there was more I could do to help you with that, my only advice is to bring this up with dell personally (via warranty) if you have that, and request an exchange unit due to lack of performance where performance is due !!! I expect that you paid a pretty penny for your device, as did I, and I think you at-least deserve that much from them to have a snappy, and beautiful device as said described above.

edit: I want to add that my boot-up time is less than 10 seconds, 8.4 - 9.0 on average according to bios boot time in task manager (Even though it really feels like its a lot faster than that when I could the seconds in my head, feels like its 6-7 seconds or less!) - oh and my system restart's are usually 8 seconds, sometimes 8.4-8.5 seconds. (:

I also want to mention that I am using windows home edition on my dell xps 13 9350, and though I wouldn't think this would matter in terms of performance and boot-time - I do want to mention that.

good luck to you mrboon, I really hope that you have since this time figured things out with your laptop (it may have something to do with the fact you bought this laptop in 2015!) - as I know I picked my XPS 13 9350 up at the right time (2016, after they announced\\released the iris 540 model).

I hope these two posts I've shared helped somebody out there with an identical PC / system set-up, as I wasn't able to find information like the bit I just shared anywhere on the internet - maybe I just wasn't looking in the right places.

Adios!!

josefin1 I see you're trying to help but if you read the thread carefully the problem appears even with SSD removed (no Windows or any other OS) so the problem is happening even without startup items of any sort. So it's rather firmware or hardware issue.