Windows Has a Four Hour Boot Time

I needed to use Photoshop this morning, so I booted my Windows PC. It took over four hours before it was finally usable. I was not in a rush, thankfully, and four hours is actually shorter than some boot times that I have experienced. The wait is much more frustrating when I boot the PC to complete a task with a very short deadline. The problem: Windows usability is terrible, especially for people who only boot Windows occasionally to perform specific tasks. The primary culprit is of course Windows Update.

First, the downloads are usually really slow. The problem is not my internet connection, and I assume that Microsoft has CDNs across the globe to handle the load on their side, so perhaps my ISP is doing traffic shaping in order to prioritize other traffic on their network.

Unfortunately, applying the updates is even slower than downloading. The vast majority of the wait time is spent applying the updates. The constant disk usage makes using other software at the same time very difficult. Even Windows itself is very slow during this time. The displayed progress (percentage of completion) is completely useless. (Sometimes it even decreases or resets to zero!) The updates almost always require a reboot, and sometimes there are multiple rounds of updates and reboots.

Windows Update manages Microsoft software, but other software handles updates separately. When the PC boots, multiple software update systems check for (and sometimes apply) updates, competing for resources with Windows Update. The design is terrible!

Even when there are no updates, it takes many minutes before the system is usable. The login screen comes up quickly, as that is a metric used in marketing, but I find it quite frustrating to be presented a UI that looks ready to use but is not. The disk access light is a better indicator of when the boot process has actually finished. While the computers are much more capable today, Windows usability is worse than it was in the 90s.

Given that I need to use proprietary software, what should I do to (legally) mitigate this issue? An obvious mitigation is to disable automatic updates. I found instructions online, but they did not work with the version of Windows installed on my PC. I understand that Microsoft does not want people to disable updates, given that Windows is the primary facilitator of malware and spam. For now, I am just putting up with the slow updates.

Note that my Windows PC is relatively new and has decent specs, as I purchased it for the sole purpose of doing multimedia (Adobe) and CAD/CAM. Why not use a Mac? I used a Mac Pro and then a MacBook Pro for running proprietary software for years, but both systems had major hardware problems in spite of the outrageous prices. With Apple forced obsolescence of software driving sales of that expensive yet poor quality hardware, I had enough. I find Windows to be very painful to use, but at least I can run it on reliable hardware and update the expensive software to the latest version.

Once Windows was usable, it only took about ten minutes to complete my task. The PC is shut down again. I will need to use Acrobat Pro later this week, but it will hopefully not take as long to boot since the system is currently up-to-date…