My computer will take nearly 10 minutes to start from a cold boot (and from a restart) yet only about a minute from hibernation, though hibernating has its own benefits, workspace set up from when I last left it and it generally being quicker on other machines.
I've been through all the suggestions for speeding up booting, including removing unnecessary start up applications and services and No GUI Boot. I'm running a 3.3Ghz i5 (2500K), 16GB 1333Mhz RAM and the primary hdd is 160GB 7200RPM (with just Windows 7 Pro installed), I also have a second 2TB 7200RPM hard drive.
The computer will go through BIOS fine, then display the Windows loading screen fine, then it will be a blank screen for a long time until showing the start screen to log in. When booting from hibernation the BIOS and Windows loading screen will display for the same time, then the blank screen will be much shorter, about 5 seconds.
Is there anything obvious (or not so obvious) thing that I am missing, as though I rarely restart (only to install updates when I do restart), I would still like to try and solve the issue.
Best Answer
There is an existing answer here: How to diagnose slow booting or logon in Windows? that may help.
There are tools you can run (see that link) that will analyse this for you.
The short answer though is that such long boot times are nearly always due to some network problem. Timeouts on network calls can be very long (5 minutes). It is very likely that the PC is trying to access a network resource before the network is ready. A boot analyser should help you find the offending software. You should then look to either remove it or delay it's startup.
Here is the link to the Microsoft Tool.