Seeing longer boot times than ever recently??

If you are seeing longer boot times and higher than normal memory usage during or just after the desktop appears, you're not alone.

Microsoft has apparently made some recent changes to the Windows Update process (circa August 2010 or so.) WU runs fairly early during the start up process, and, because of these changes, boot times (to when the PC is fully up and running) have recently grown to crazy times for some PCs.

I learned of this while working on some company laptops. They are a bit older XP machines and all had 512 MB of RAM. Since some of this memory is used for video support, each laptop had less than 500 MB for processing.

Well, when one of these laptops were started, it would sometimes be as long as 12 to 15 minutes before they were usable. Unacceptable to say the least. After running Task Manager (which wasn't easy either because things were so slow) I learned that WU was now running from 400 to 600 MB by itself. When you add the other stuff a PC needs, I was seeing memory usage as high as 600 to 800 MB. Since the PC had less than 500 MB available, it was using the hard drive swap/paging file to compensate. Add the needed hard drive usage for WU and other stuff starting and you were headed for disaster, boot time-wise.

The answer is more RAM memory. I boosted the RAM in each PC to 1GB and the difference was night and day better. Boot time is now 3 to 5 minutes. And of course, even after booting, the overall speed of the machine is snappier.

The lesson I learned from this? With XP, I now feel the minimum RAM needed is 1 GB. Anything less and you are going to experience a slow down. Especially during the boot process...

**EDIT**
If you are wondering why I placed this in the XP section, it's because most Vista/7 PCs typically have more memory. They are less likely to suffer from this issue...

Thanks for the info, HAN. I don't suppose M$ is going to do anything about this issue, or are they just going to require hardware upgrades so you can use Windows on older machines.

Interesting discovery, thanks HAN :)

I suspect MS are making the best use of the hardware available on the majority of PCs these days. I don't see anything wrong with that myself, but I do think they ought to be more open about it, so that those who are running on older hardware are at least aware of the issues.

FWIW--On at least two occasions I was trying to reach a website in the usual manner using IE8. The blue circle just kept revolving. I did not get a 404 or other error message. I finally quit the effort, and then it became apparent that Windows was trying to contact (or had already contacted) the Windows Update site. All other traffic, it seems, is blocked when that happens. I have Windows Update set to notify me but neither download nor install Updates. And I had not yet gotten the notification when I tried to reach the other website.