Computer takes 1 to 2 hours to boot occasionally

Joined
Aug 19, 2018
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I have a 2 year old desktop computer. Nothing fancy, i3, Win10 Home, 4GB memory, 1TB HDD. It has started to take 1 to 2 hours to boot up. Sometimes it boots up no problem. Other times it takes hours. I'm not sure where to start looking and am not even sure this is a hardware problem or software problem. I may try to reformat the drive and re-install Windows, but wanted a second opinion.
BTW, it doesn't have a lot of software loaded on it, just Office 2010 that is used for writing in Word and some spreadsheets and some internet surfing.
 
Id check out the hard drive first, might be in the process of failing. Random long load times are never a good sign, as that always happened on drives that I had fail.
 
And windows also likes to do updates at boot up time. If you haven't updated in a while, it could be auto updating at boot up and I've seen computers go dark for what seems forever - even though you know the computer is on.

At 4gb you really need to add more ram, at the very least. You will notice a BIG difference. Throw in an SSD and it will be like an entirely new computer. Even if you live in MS Word / Excel.
 
Windows update on mechanical can take forever, but definitely do a check disk on it, and clean temp files.
 
Disable fastboot in bios. My system was taking 5-20 min to start when its normally 15 seconds and that was the culprit. Started with a MS update.
 
Take a look at Event Viewer and see if there are read/write errors in the system log.

Run a chkdsk to check the HDD

Run memtest86 to check RAM

Could be a CPU that is starting to fail but not causing BSODs.

Could be a dying CMOS battery causing the mobo to behave erratically.
 
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