My Windows 11 machine is very sluggish and take long to reboot. Have you ever done an in place “Repair Install” - it is suppose to be the safest way and recommended by Microsoft
This is the safest and most complete method.
It reinstalls Windows 11 over itself, keeps:
All your programs (including QuickBooks 2016, Outlook, etc.)
Thank you for your thoughts. Still scares the heck out of me to do this kind of stuff because I can’t afford to lose my windows environment. I’ll give some more thought. Thank you so much.
Adjust the CPU Quantum. Requires a Reboot and it needs checking because updates and changes using Win11 Settings (Gear Icon) will reset it back to 2.
I’ve never got DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth to work properly, it just seems to hang for hours.
Personally I would reinstall using the Windows Media Creation Tool.
After creating the USB Drive, add the driver’s you need to install to a sub folder on the USB drive to reinstall using Device Manager when it identifies unknown hardware.
You can still install windows with a local account and without internet access using Shift + F10 and then OOBE\BYPASSNRO
There are major differences between 25H2 and 24H2. 25H2 seems to be a nice version of Windows IMO. It will be interesting to see what 26H2 has instore for us, if its released this year.
In my experience slowness is often caused by missing files. Here is what I run through when I have issues. Run CMD.EXE elevated and then try:
sfc /scannow
This scans the integrity of the OS files and replaces files if needed.
Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth
This checks the health of the OS. If there are problems, I run:
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth
This restores the health of the OS and downloads and replaces any files that are missing or corrupt.
Then finally, I run sfc again:
sfc /scannow
to check and make sure everything is good.
I would suggest to use imaging software like Macrium Reflect to create an image backup and also create a restore image. I have been using it for years and it is awesome. One thing with MR is that you can mount the backup image so you can pull individual files out of it if you need to. If you need to restore, MR will create a boot partition for itself and initiate the boot manager when you start windows. Windows is always the default and will auto-start if you don’t click on it within 10 seconds if I remember correctly.
I use Virtual Machines for ALL development work and have been since 2008. Makes everything so much easier.
I tried your approach and there was minimal corruption reported. I ran the fix and things seem quicker at boot (maybe just wishful thinking) and I also made a lot of services Delayed Starts this helps some too. - thanks for the info
FYI: I was talking about total system slowness - not just CW development.
Yep, I know, I have had my share of weird slowdowns over the decades In my experience often times they are caused by AV programs that go into some kind of overdrive. I recall a few years back one of them just went nuts on my system. I had to completely remove it, which took some doing. Had the same issue with Acronis - it started scanning files all the time which triggered AV which slowed everything down to a crawl. Been using Macrium for image backups for years and never had issues.
Sometimes you can see what is going on in Task Manager and Performance Manager (which is gone now in the latest W11 - or ate least I can’t find it right now) by going to details and then add the columns for memory, CPU, IO, handles, etc. and see if something is causing a lot of traffic that doesn’t make sense.
After I upgraded my Dell laptop to Win11, some of the Dell utilities didn’t work properly and the laptop became basically useless. I uninstalled all the Dell utilities, and it went back to normal.
We’ve done about 100 Win10->Win11 in place upgrades over the last few months.
A variety of the desktops required storage upgrades and Macrium is much better than Acronis.
Buy another drive and image your current one before hand. Cheaper than your time!
Most upgrades went smoothly but we had 3 machines where performance tanked.
Tried most everything but in the end required a fresh install.
BEFORE performing any in-place upgrade or repair, Run windows update to make sure you are COMPLETELY up to date. Don’t skip anything even if you think it’ll be replaced or not part of windows.
Hi, I am on Win 11 Pro 25H2. It began slowing down after an update a few weeks ago. I literally could watch the computer think with each mouse click. I also had slow compiling of Clarion 11 at times. I found a few things. One Drive was slow and would interfere with my compiles and sometimes kill them. So, when I do serious Clarion work, I turn off OneDrive so it does not try to real time sync my clarion app folder. I found that windows explorer has a function which constantly monitors files on the disk - It makes finding files in Windows much quicker, I use Everything, so I disabled this explorer “feature”. Acronis has several agents which watch the disk - since I no longer use Acronis, I disabled most of them. Look at what is in your Startup folder and turn off what you don’t need. (there are all kinds of programs that will sync your phone across multiple devices, etc.) Turn them off if you aren’t using them. Look at Services and see what is running and hogging and using CPU and RAM. Disable those that you don’t need. After doing these I got significant speed up.
Ron
IMHO OneDrive is worse than the old “Norton Virus” for making a system unusable.
It’s the first thing I uninstall on any new machine or in a VM and the result is instantly noticeable.
I just had an interesting half a day working with ChatGPT to restore the EFI partition in a VM.
After I installed 24H2 in one of my Windows 11 VirtualBox VMs, things slowly went sideways. Windows would still boot, but anything that tried to do an in place repair or upgrade would fail early with a generic “critical error” and error code 0x80070003. I paused updates for a while and waited until 25H2 media was available, but even running setup from an ISO offline did the exact same thing.
What finally cracked it was digging into the setup logs under C:\$WINDOWS.~BT\Sources\Panther\setuperr.log. The log was complaining that it could not retrieve the system partition NT path and that it could not confirm a UEFI disk layout. That was the clue.
DiskPart showed a 100 MB partition that should have been the EFI System Partition, but it was typed as a normal basic data partition GUID instead of the EFI GUID. Windows was booting anyway, but Windows Setup refused to proceed because it could not properly identify the system partition.
Working with ChatGPT, we fixed it by using DiskPart to set the correct EFI partition type GUID, then assigning a drive letter to the FAT32 system partition and rebuilding the boot files with bcdboot. After that, the in place repair finally ran clean and the VM is back to updating and installing normally.
I give credit where it is due to ChatGPT for knowing what to look for, what it meant when we found it and the path forward to fxi it.
As an old hardware guy I knew most of the story, but there were places where being able to type in exact GUID and settings and reset things at the lowest level came from ChatGPT having the details.
As I often say, the success in using AI usually comes down to “Ask good questions”.
I disabled OneDrive ages ago for the same reason. I just switched from Acronis to Macrium Reflect (So much faster) I did change most my services to delayed start for the ones i know did not matter.