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The wife has complained about this on and off and I finally got a chance to see it in action.

Machine is a HP EliteBook 8570p with a 256gb toshiba ssd and 12gb ram. (This is an upgrade from a lenovo t420 and windows WAS NOT cleanly installed on the machine. I just moved the ssd from the old machine to the new one.)

The machine boots so slowly the initial "circling dots" animation is broken.
I finally got it to give me the task manager and the performance tab says the cpu is stuck at 0.1 ghz.

I could not do much else so I just watched it plod through the boot up and then suddenly the cpu was reported as running at 2.7ghz and right after that system performance was normal.

I did a complete shutdown and rebooted and it booted in 30 seconds flat just like normal and the starting animation with the circling dots was fluid as it normally is.

This seems to happen most often after a ungraceful shutdown such as sudden power failure.

Any idea's on what to change to get it to boot normally every time?
All necessary drivers are installed and there are no unknown devices in the device manager.
I also updated the bios before swapping hard drives.

Is it possible the fan is failing, and not always spinning up on boot, resulting in the CPU thermally throttling itself? There could also be something wonky with the BIOS, where every so often it initially doesn't spin the fan (or spin it above minimum) and so the CPU only gets cooled when the Windows power management stuff takes over.

Similarly, there might be something wonky in the BIOS power management that doesn't allow the CPU to ramp up to its non-idle frequency until Windows kicks it in the ass. I haven't worried about this kind of thing in years, but completely resetting the BIOS might help here.

Look for a performance/boot setting in UEFI/BIOS that controls processor boot sequence frequency. On recent Intel-chipset desktop boards, I've seen various manufacturers identify and set this differently. Obviously I'm not sure if this is the issue but it sounds like it's worth a look. For example, here's a section of the Supermicro manual where I remember seeing this.

You checked the boot settings options and the list of start-up programs? You can definitely speed it up with a non-gui boot, etc., and I usually have to disable some start-up programs such as iTunes and Google stuff.

My wife's back-up system is an HP EliteBook 8540p--I had put in a 512MB SSD and just finished updating to latest Windows 10. Runs a bit hot but pretty quick to boot.

MOSFET wrote:

Look for a performance/boot setting in UEFI/BIOS that controls processor boot sequence frequency. On recent Intel-chipset desktop boards, I've seen various manufacturers identify and set this differently. Obviously I'm not sure if this is the issue but it sounds like it's worth a look. For example, here's a section of the Supermicro manual where I remember seeing this.

Code: Select all

Power and Performance>>
CPU - Power Management Control>>
Boot performance mode>>
This option enables the selection of the default CPU performance during
system boot. The options are Max Battery, Max Non-Turbo Performance,
and Turbo Performance.

Thanks!
I'll have to see if there is such an option.

I just find it weird that it only does this after an ungraceful shutdown. I've never seen this issue before with any machine. I was under the impression that computers always booted at max cpu speed and then the OS throttled it.

I can occasionally get it to do it by holding down the power button for 10+ seconds.

The rest of the time it boots almost as fast as my main desktop machine. Not bad for a laptop at all!

Neutronbeam wrote:

You checked the boot settings options and the list of start-up programs? You can definitely speed it up with a non-gui boot, etc., and I usually have to disable some start-up programs such as iTunes and Google stuff.

This is an issue with CPU speed after a bad shutdown.
CPU is running at 100mhz for some reason.
Once the problem clears the machine boots at normal speed.

UberGerbil wrote:

Is it possible the fan is failing, and not always spinning up on boot, resulting in the CPU thermally throttling itself? There could also be something wonky with the BIOS, where every so often it initially doesn't spin the fan (or spin it above minimum) and so the CPU only gets cooled when the Windows power management stuff takes over.

Similarly, there might be something wonky in the BIOS power management that doesn't allow the CPU to ramp up to its non-idle frequency until Windows kicks it in the ass. I haven't worried about this kind of thing in years, but completely resetting the BIOS might help here.

The fan definitely works and is not making any noises etc. Speccy reports fan speeds and you can see it ramp up and down.
Laptop runs cool to warm most of the time even when running most games.
Much cooler than the old Lenovo t420 which would heat soak and then throttle very often.

I'll check the bios again for anything I might have missed.

thanks for your help guys! Googling this issue gave me almost zero hits.

Gotta be a BIOS quirk. Looks like they have a fairly recent release (BIOS F.68 Rev.A on 7/18/17), so I'd give that a shot if you haven't already. Oddly, the website doesn't show BIOS updates if you select Windows 10, so you might not have seen it (try Win7 instead).

Just throwing this out there but go ahead and disable "Fast Boot" in the power options. It might be attempting to boot using cached data from the crash.

The Egg wrote:

Gotta be a BIOS quirk. Looks like they have a fairly recent release (BIOS F.68 Rev.A on 7/18/17), so I'd give that a shot if you haven't already. Oddly, the website doesn't show BIOS updates if you select Windows 10, so you might not have seen it (try Win7 instead).

Yup I noticed that. I have the bios one version prior to that installed already.
I guess I can add that to things to try.

Omniman wrote:

Just throwing this out there but go ahead and disable "Fast Boot" in the power options. It might be attempting to boot using cached data from the crash.

Interesting idea!

I'll give it a try.