Windows Startup Timer : How Fast Windows PC Starts?

If you bought a business class notebook computer (laptop) then chances are that it will come with a large capacity hard disk drive (HDD). These days these laptops are coming with 1 TB and 2 TB capacity hard disk drives. While these are very large size hard disk drives, they are slower compared to the solid state drives (SSD).

So what many people are doing is that they buy a business class laptop and replace the HDD with a SSD. The SSD makes a huge difference and reduces the time Windows takes to boot into the login screen. But after installing a brand new fast SSD, how would you determine if Windows PC is now starting faster than before when you had Windows operating system installed on an HDD.

We can use a portable application called Windows Startup Timer to monitor how fast your PC is starting. With any average CPU, fast RAM and superfast SSD, it should not take more than 15-20 seconds to boot into Windows 10 or Windows 11.

Windows Startup Timer

For using Windows Startup Timer, we can double-click on the downloaded program StartupTimer-Portable.exe. The program displays come basic information about your PC. You can click on the Restart Computer button to restart Windows. Before doing this please make sure that you have saved any open documents or closed open projects.

When your Windows PC starts, it will load Windows desktop and then the window for Windows Startup Timer will appear once again automatically. This time this program will display you about how much time it took to fully boot into Windows desktop and how much time it took to first display the desktop.

Windows Startup Timer

In the above screenshot which was taken inside a Windows 11 virtual machine running inside VMWare Player and it took around 54 seconds to fully boot. For a physical real machine, it is definitely going to be a shorter duration in the order of 10 to 20 seconds.

You can download Windows Startup Timer from https://startuptimer.com/.