Fixing windows that has slow desktop loading after restart or cold boot
I've recently encountered an odd issue where a laptop would boot up and be on be stuck on the "Please Wait" Screen when booting. It would eventually get to the desktop but only after a time range of 30 minutes to 3 hours of waiting. Running repair utilities such as sfc, chkdsk, and a variety of 3rd party tools did not do anything to resolve the issue. In fact the tools were saying the drive was just fine; the drive is an SSD and the utilities reported the drive to be in good condition. So I removed the drive from the laptop and connected it to my workstation where I ran disk utilities on the SSD, and it passed all tests; so I re-imaged the SSD to a new SSD, with the same boot result. I did a test with adding a new ssd and doing an install of windows; the performance was better but it still took about 4 minutes to get to the desktop.
Being unsatisfied with this result, while not wanting to deal with this issue a few months down the road I thought I would try one thing before going the route reinstalling windows and all the default apps route, I opened the laptop, left the SSD installed on the laptop. I re-installed the original ssd with all the user's data on it, unplugged the power to the laptop and the laptop battery. I then pressed the on button for the laptop and kept holding it for 30 seconds (just to be safe) to discharge the laptop's capacitors. Once I discharged the capacitors on the laptop and reconnected the laptop battery and turned on the laptop the system booted to the windows desktop in about 10 seconds. So not only did this save me from having to reinstall windows, all the default organization applications and transfer the users data, the system performed better then it had in months. The next time your having slow boot times, try discharge the capacitors it might save you a lot of time.
