Should I set up a boot drive for Windows 10?

May 22, 2018 11:49 AM

Should I set up a boot drive for Windows 10? If so, how do I do it?

My computer is increasingly slow to load, and freezes frequently. I have two external hard drives attached to it---a 1T and a 3T. I'm wondering if it would be better to have a separate boot drive, and if so, I need directions as to how to install it.

Any suggestions are very welcome. Thanks, hive mind!

posted by ragtimepiano to Technology (15 answers total)

Is there already a drive inside the computer that it boots from, or are all storage devices external?
posted by nickggully at 11:55 AM on May 22, 2018

Response by poster: It boots from an internal drive.
posted by ragtimepiano at 12:10 PM on May 22, 2018

By and large, if that drive is getting filled up, or is a rather slow disk drive, replacing it, or adding another solid state (SSD) drive to boot windows will dramatically improve the performance of the computer.

Does the freezing and slowness continue to happen when the external drives are disconnected? If so, that points to an issue with the external drives. Are they on the same electrical outlet as the PC? This can lead to grounding issues at times.
posted by nickggully at 12:12 PM on May 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: The 1 T drive is hooked up to the computer via USB only. The 3T drive is connected by USB and powered by a separate electrical outlet. I will unplug both and check to see if boot is faster, then get back to you. Thanks for info so far!
posted by ragtimepiano at 1:10 PM on May 22, 2018

Response by poster: I disconnected the external drives, and rebooted. The reboot was a little faster but still slow (up to five minutes to get everything back!). Any suggestions?
posted by ragtimepiano at 2:48 PM on May 22, 2018

The speed of boot will have little to nothing to do with your external drives. It depends much more on the speed of your internal drive, the one that the OS is booting off of. If you want to avoid spending extra money, you may want to try reinstalling Windows on your internal drive first, but if you have a desktop or a laptop that supports having additional drives added to it, you could install a faster drive and boot from it instead.

I don't recommend booting from external (e.g. USB-connected) drives under normal operation. It's unlikely to be faster than an internal drive anyway.
posted by Aleyn at 6:08 PM on May 22, 2018

If it's taking five minutes to boot, it isn't the speed of the drive that is the issue and it isn't worth spending money on an SSD because that won't help.

I suspect that there is some corrupted driver at startup that is hanging things up. As a wild guess, you might try reinstalling the graphics driver.

Is this a native Windows 10 installation or was it upgraded from a previous version, 7 or 8?

Did the slowness occur recently after a Windows update? If so, you might try using Restore to go back to a previous configuration.

If all else fails you might try a clean install of Windows 10.
posted by JackFlash at 6:30 PM on May 22, 2018

Response by poster: It was an update from Windows 8. I'm wondering if some programs may be slowing it down--Last Pass? Spotify?
posted by ragtimepiano at 7:03 PM on May 22, 2018

It's unlikely that the problem is one of those programs during boot. More likely a bad driver during the update from Win 8.

Try restarting your computer in Safe Mode. In safe mode Windows only loads the minimal configuration to get your computer running and eliminates a lot of device drivers.

For Windows 10 to enter safe mode, while running Windows, hold down the Shift key and click on the Power button at lower left and then select Restart. When you get to the menu, select 4 for Safe Mode.

See how long this reboot process takes compared to your regular reboot process.
posted by JackFlash at 7:21 PM on May 22, 2018

What antivirus suite are you running, if any? I've seen Panda Free Antivirus lose its mind after a failed self-update and cause this kind of ridiculously slow startup, as well as a completely unacceptable hit to overall system responsiveness. Uninstalling it and rebooting fixes the problem.

I used to like and recommend Panda Free, but have now seen this happen often enough to enough people to have given up on it as a bad job, especially since MS has included what used to be Microsoft Security Essentials as a component of the inbuilt Windows Defender since Windows 8.
posted by flabdablet at 4:52 AM on May 23, 2018

Another thing I've seen cause very slow loading and responsiveness freezes is disk blocks becoming unreadable on hard drives. The drives will mark such blocks as "pending reallocation" and replace them with spares the next time they're written, but if they never do get written, they just cause very slow disk errors every time they're read. If you stick your ear on the case of a PC that's doing this, you'll hear the drive making fairly regular kazzzzick... tick. kazzzzick... tick. sounds as it resets the seek mechanism during those read retries.

If you install Passmark DiskCheckup, you can use it to look at the SMART log for your internal drive and see whether the raw value for Current Pending Sector Count on that drive is nonzero. If it is, your internal drive is probably on its way toward failure and replacing it would be a good idea.
posted by flabdablet at 5:00 AM on May 23, 2018

Best answer: Another thing that can badly slow Windows down is installing "performance booster" software on it. Anything from Uniblue, or anything that describes itself as a "driver optimizer" or "system optimizer" or "registry cleaner" or "security scan", you should just uninstall with extreme prejudice. Toolbars for Internet Explorer likewise. None of them is worth a pinch of shit and most of them slow you down, especially if they have anything at all to do with Ask.com or come from an outfit called Conduit.

These things most often arrive as bundled foistware during installation of other software. When installing anything on Windows, it pays to examine every screen of the installer very carefully and turn off checkboxes for "special offers" you didn't specifically intend to install.

If you've had one of these things on your PC, it would pay you to run a scan with Malwarebytes after getting rid of it, just in case it invited some of its little friends along as well. I recommend disabling all of Malwarebytes's real-time protection components before doing the scan, and telling it not to start when Windows starts; that way, you can just exercise its nice competent scanner without having it slow your PC down before the free trial period of its Premium features ends a month after installation.
posted by flabdablet at 5:12 AM on May 23, 2018

Response by poster: Thanks for suggestions---I am running Malware Premium.

Additional info, everyone: I often get a message "A script from last pass is slowing down the loading of this page" with an option to disable the script. How do I stop this from happening?
posted by ragtimepiano at 4:46 PM on May 23, 2018

I am running Malware Premium.

Try turning off all its realtime protection components, then telling it not to start when Windows starts, then reboot and see if you get a boot time improvement.

You're the second person I've encountered in the last three days with an anomalously slow Windows box, and both of you were running Malwarebytes with its realtime protection turned on. I've always found it to be a really useful post-infection cleanup tool, but I'm less convinced that it's more useful than what's already supplied with Windows 10 for infection prevention.
posted by flabdablet at 9:35 PM on May 23, 2018

Response by poster: I tried the suggestions for malware premium, but without noticeable change in bootup time.....
posted by ragtimepiano at 3:43 PM on May 25, 2018