Windows 8.1 is booting very slow .Takes around 5 minutes to reach lock screen

Hi Sumit,

There could be several reasons which might slow down the computer such as unnecessary files on the hard disk or applications/ programs running during the startup or shutdown process.

Please try these steps and check if it makes any difference:

Method 1:

Run the system maintenance troubleshooter.

Follow these steps:

a)Press the ‘Windows + W’ key on the keyboard.

b)Type troubleshooter in the search box and then pressenter.

c)Click system and security and run theSystem maintenance troubleshooter.

Check if it has improved the performance. If not, proceed to the next method.

Method 2:

I would suggest you to place the computer in a clean boot state and check if the issue persists.

Refer to the section “How to determine what is causing the problem by performing a clean boot” to check for the application or program that is causing this issue:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135

Note: Please refer to section:How to reset the computer to start as usual after troubleshooting with clean boot of the Kb article to boot the computer in normal startup after fixing the issue. This article also applies for Windows 8.1.

For reference, refer to the link to improve computer’s performance:

“Ways to improve your PC's performance”

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/improve-pc-performance#section_1

From the link, also check if there are applications or programs running at startup. You can disable if they are not required to run at startup.

Hi Sumit,

Windows 8 fast startup is a new feature which speeds up the startup process by creating a hibernate file which contains system configuration data and is re-loaded each time a PC starts up.  In most cases, if Windows 8 detects a change in the PC configuration, it will ignore the hibernate file and perform a normal startup process which reloads the kernel, services, device drivers and applications. 

However in some cases it's possible that a change in the configuration may not be detected correctly and you may get an error message stating that your configuration conflicts with the Windows 8 hibernate file configuration.  If you swap PC components regularly on a Windows 8 PC you may want to experiment with disabling the Windows 8 fast startup feature to avoid these potential startup issues.

We are glad that you were able to resolve the issue by disabling the fast startup

I had a similar problem on my laptop.
Windows hung up for 5 minutes on a black screen with a Windows icon and a spinning wheel. An SSD that continuously worked at this time.
I have tried many ways that I found on the site. Nothing helped. It took me a long time to solve this. But finally succeeded.
Open a command line with administrator privileges then turn off system hibernation with a command 
powercfg -h off