Upgraded to W11 now taking 10-15minutes to boot

If DISM reports the Error 1168, Element not found error message, it indicates the previous version has been deleted, and there's currently not a previous version to go back to.

However you may have a Macrium backup image.

Ok goodnight.

Previous version was Win10 and that was in windows.old. Not wanting that to be automatically deleted, I've temporarily renamed that folder. Because I renamed it, DISM naturally enough can't find it in the expected location.

Worst case I have a clone I made of the Win10 boot drive the day before I updated to W11 and I can revert back to that and rely on 0patch to keep the OS up to date with security patches.

If @zinou is available he may be able to have you run WPR.





The BIOS:

Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. Z790 AORUS ELITE X WIFI7

F4 09/12/2023

[td]SYSTEM PRODUCT NAME[/td] [td]BIOS[/td]

Upgrade the BIOS to the most up to date non-beta BIOS.

1. Turn off startup programmes. Nothing should run at startup.

2 Turn off visual effects and animations. They slow down Windows and you wait for pretty effects to be drawn.

The clean boot process I recommended earlier would be a lot quicker and easier for you. Either it will help or it won't - you'll know quickly.

suatcini54's suggestion seems to have had a big effect. After making those registry changes the full boot is maybe 2-3 minutes. Slower compared to the same hardware booting from W10, but a sight lot better than 15-20 minutes and I can live with 2-3 minutes.

I'll look into that 0patch error. See if uninstalling it and/or reinstalling makes a difference. I have some software I use a lot which is no longer being maintained and 0patch provides security patches for them. As for the other items that load at startup, running such things is always a tradeoff between functionality and speed.

I'll also upgrade the bios, I noted that was out of date.

As for animation effects ... just what are they? Searching online I find lots about turning that on or off, but I can't find anything that says what it actually does.

The registry changes are for startup applications.

This is a tutorial:

Just restarted the pc and it is back to the boot speed expected for the hardware, so that particular problem has been solved. Thanks everyone for the help & suggestions.

Other problems remain, but if I can't solve them, I'll post new thread(s). And more will surface no doubt as I test peripherals and software. The webcam was broken, so had to uninstall, reboot and reinstall the software for that. Other issues will no doubt arise since the W11 was upgraded from W10 which was in turn upgraded from W7 via imaging from an older machine .. there are pros & cons for clean installs.

The 0patch error and updating bios are on the to do list, but I may wait until after xmas to deal with those.

A postscript .. the 0patch error appears to be the result of a conflict between 0patch and ESET antivirus. At this stage according to 0patch the only solution is to either permanently uninstall either 0patch or ESET (not great since both are pre-paid software and each performs a desirable function) or to turn off a setting in ESET. 0patch works by applying patches to software loaded into the computer's memory and not to the actual files on the hard drive. ESET detects this intrusion into the RAM, deems it malware like behaviour and blocks the patching, hence the error. The same conflict between 0patch and ESET also causes other windows issues I've experienced (both in W10 and W11). The easy fix is to turn off the relevant ESET setting. A far more challenging fix is to detect every process affected by the ESET/0patch clash and whitelist those in ESET. Challenging because that would be 100s of processes (0patch is currently applying 173 discrete patches on my pc, but each patch can be applied to multiple processes and any one process could have multiple patches). I went for the easier fix.

This is unrelated to the slow boot issue (which was fixed, as above). I'm only mentioning it here since the 0patch error was flagged in this thread.

You can manage memory by setting your own range instead of letting Windows manage it, to get the best balance of speed, memory allocation and bootup time on your PC.