Knock 5 hours off Windows 7 boot time with this simple trick

Windows 7 boot time: five hours to five minutes in five steps

This is a blatant troll post, if you’re here via LinkedIn then you may wish to skip reading it 😉

The problem

I got a new laptop.  It came with Windows 7 pre-installed.  I hadn’t used Windows for a decade, with the exception of an old XP installation I keep around for running Adobe Illustrator and COD4:Modern Warfare.  I decided to give Windows 7 a try.

First two days with Windows 7

Day 1: It’s sluggish and the UX is a decade behind the times, but otherwise it seems ok.  Boot time was around a minute which is pretty poor for a clean system with no user meddling yet, but not terrible.  After a while, some dialog popped up telling me to reboot the computer.  This was annoying, but it gave me the option to postpone it for a few hours (note: postpone permanently would have been a better option).

Day 2: Turn it on in the morning to check a bus schedule, and I get this:

Windows 7 boot time hell

I hadn’t told it to update, and since I had tethered it via a 4G connection the day before, I was wondering how much of my data allowance it had burnt up downloading updates.

Linux systems* typically update when you tell them to and they install the updates in the background rather than hitting the user with this denial-of-service attach.  They don’t constantly pester you to restart the computer, nor do they also don’t forcefully restart the computer while you’re making a coffee, causing data loss.

* Excluding Ubuntu which may auto-update in the background.  Still, Ubuntu won’t hit you with DOS attacks or data loss as part of its update mechanism.

I’m a bit perplexed as to why Microsoft have decided that by design, their operating system should hit their users with denial of service attacks and potential data loss.

A few hours later when I got back home, it was still “configuring Windows”.  After quite a while, it rebooted.  Then I was greeted with this:

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Another reboot followed, then more updating/configuring.  I don’t know how long this would have taken to finish, as I decided that I’d had enough of this proprietary crap… I powered the laptop off and removed Windows, then installed Arch and Ubuntu onto BTRFS with a shared home folder and automatic daily snapshot backups.

The solution

Use Linux instead?

Troll face

This Microsoft-originating denial of service attack also happened to another computer shortly afterwards.  The best solution for a home user is probably to just disable Windows Updates completely.  Sure you don’t receive security updates from Microsoft, but you also no longer get peroidically attacked by Microsoft either.  Accepting a low risk of being attacked in exchange for getting rid of a certain risk of being attacked.

This five-step process is quicker to do than the typical Windows 7 boot time, with or without Microsoft’s malicious updater enabled…

1. Start → Run (or Super+R hotkey)

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2. “services.msc”

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3. Find “Windows Updates” (or “Automatic Updates” on Windows XP)

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Double-click to open properties (or right-click, properties)

4. Disable the service

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One would think that we could just mark it as “manual”, that way it will run only when we manually check for updates, but not when we’re on a mobile connection or when we’re streaming/gaming…  But as expected, Microsoft software does not do as it is told.  Leave it as manual and it will still occasionally burn bandwidth and pester you to reboot – but you won’t be able to manually check for updates as it will complain that the service isn’t started.

5. Stop the service

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Hooray, that’s the biggest security vulnerability in Windows 7 (besides the OS itself) patched up 😀 And the Windows 7 boot time drops from five hours to five minutes 😀

But I can’t / don’t want to disable Windows Updates

Then instead find a similarly-minded friend…  You can play Hacky Racers with your windows 7 boot times!  Who’s machine will boot up first?  Extra ten points if it doesn’t do any reboots in the process!

Dual-core Sandy i5 with SSD (left) vs. Quad-core Haswell i7 with spinning metal (right)  Left won by ten minutes and two less reboots.