17 R5, boots **extremely slowly**

Question

For the past few weeks at most, my Alienware 17 R5 with an Intel Core i9-8950HK CPU, a Samsung 970 Pro 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD and a 4TB 2.5'' SATA-III Samsung 860 Pro SSD, has been booting up *very slowly*. I can't remember if this was after an update, either Dell / Alienware or from Microsoft.

The problem is that, after turning on the laptop, there will be at least a 10+ second pause. Next, "ALIENWARE [TM]" with the Alienware head logo is displayed. Next, a spinning ring-of-dots progress indicator is displayed, and, it spins for up to 1 minute. Next, the screen will go completely black, and it can take up to 2 minutes before Windows 10 shows any signs of booting.

I have also noticed that my laptop has been slow, despite the SSDs and the CPU and GPU ( Nvidia 1080 ). I've gone through the normal steps of checking for viruses or other malware, disabling unneeded software at startup etc. but nothing seems to help. Also, every time I try to use Dell SupportAssist or Alienware Update, the update fails.

Has anyone else experienced these issues?

Thanks,

jdb2

jdb2 · Answer

Well, I got a response from Dell, and it was quite disappointing. They said that they couldn't give me support because I had 3rd party SSDs in my laptop. Well, how about 3rd party USB or Thunderbolt devices? Jeez... stupid :

"This is ridiculous -- the problem has nothing to do with the drives. The drives are both Samsung very high performance SSDs; I don't see how they could slow down my system -- vastly speeding it up is what I'd expect. But, I *did not* have any of these slow boot times or performance issues when I installed the drives which I have been using for a while. The slow boot times and general slowness in Windows 10 only started a few weeks ago at the most. Also, if I turn on the laptop after having disconnected all the external USB devices, it boots much faster but there is still a delay at the Alienware screen. I did not experience any of these problems until recently and I haven't changed anything that's plugged, via USB, into my laptop.

Also, Dell SupportAssist and Alienware Update always report failure when trying to update drivers, and I don't know why this is.

The sources of the problems, in my judgement, are Dell's BIOS, possibly Dell software updates and possibly Windows updates."

Here is the Dell support e-mail to which I responded above :

"

On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 10:17 AM Dell EMC Community <noreply@dellcommunity.dell.com> wrote:

Hello jdb2,
You have received a private message in the Dell Community community.

Subject: Re: You’ve received a private message from Dell Community Forum
From: DELL-Cares
Date: 11-21-2019 10:17 AM

Hello, thank you for waiting, I can see you upgraded the drives that came originally with this computer, unfortunately we can only support issues based on the original configuration. However, I can recommend you to follow this video in order to address some of the slow boot issues: [stupid links to Youtube reinstall Windows videos removed by me]

"

Does anyone have any idea of what might be causing the slowness?

Thanks,

jdb2

Alienware

17 R5, boots extremely slowly

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