Windows 8.1 Pro x64 UEFI very slow boot and shutdown

I do have to point out that the other 2 computers I upgraded are fine... A Toshiba Satellite and a homebrew Sandybridge with a Gigabyte MB. And that if I can somehow get into safemode (why doesn't troubleshooting recognize my wireless keyboard!!) the computer in question boots as it should.

ASUS N56JR (i7-4700HQ, FullHD GTX760M) with Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD and 16GB RAM, bought a few days ago, almost all useless softwares and apps removed and nothing installed yet except for skype desktop version. No swap, energy saving options set to max performance and fast boot option disabled. Local account login and no Microsoft account automatic connection allowed.

With Windows 8 Pro everything was fine, updated to 8.1 and boot took a few seconds more (so nothing important) but shutdown became minutes. Absolutely unexceptable.

After two days of attempts, including the suggested Clean Boot and similar, which was useless and made me install unwanted software, I tried the suggested solution of disabling one-by-one all the drivers. Finally it worked simply switching off the Bluetooth module (Qualcomm Atheros). Now everything seems to work, and these are my times: shutdown in less than 4 seconds, login screen in 11 seconds (from completely switched off computer), desktop in 15 seconds and complete boot in 24 seconds.

A little off topic: it seems that the Intel Graphics driver (10.18.10.3308) it's not working fine since the writings on the screen are a little fuzzy, as well as the icons in taskbar and system tray. Up to today, there are no available Windows 8.1 drivers from ASUS download site for my laptop. Let's hope there will be, someday...

I hope this will help you.

Have you tried turning on the ClearType text mode? It was on the Win 7 OS and I think it is also on Win 8.

ASUS N56JR (i7-4700HQ, FullHD GTX760M) with Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD and 16GB RAM, bought a few days ago, almost all useless softwares and apps removed and nothing installed yet except for skype desktop version. No swap, energy saving options set to max performance and fast boot option disabled. Local account login and no Microsoft account automatic connection allowed.

With Windows 8 Pro everything was fine, updated to 8.1 and boot took a few seconds more (so nothing important) but shutdown became minutes. Absolutely unexceptable.

After two days of attempts, including the suggested Clean Boot and similar, which was useless and made me install unwanted software, I tried the suggested solution of disabling one-by-one all the drivers. Finally it worked simply switching off the Bluetooth module (Qualcomm Atheros). Now everything seems to work, and these are my times: shutdown in less than 4 seconds, login screen in 11 seconds (from completely switched off computer), desktop in 15 seconds and complete boot in 24 seconds.

A little off topic: it seems that the Intel Graphics driver (10.18.10.3308) it's not working fine since the writings on the screen are a little fuzzy, as well as the icons in taskbar and system tray. Up to today, there are no available Windows 8.1 drivers from ASUS download site for my laptop. Let's hope there will be, someday...

I hope this will help you.

Hi,

Take care about "having the solution" : you can pass a lot of time as i did, trying different recommandations and still having this problem, even more if you do a bad manipulation. There is not one reason but a lot as we see on theses 17 pages of this thread.

• bluetooth
• Drivers incompatibilities
• but also others ...

I have desactivated my bluetooth, then check deaply and updated drivers (some are very difficult to find as accelerometer protection and some cannot be desactivated to test...) without any major improvement. Then i have analyse Win log of Boot sequence and see a lot of errors on systems program that i don't know and also "time out exceeded" (30 000 ms) on different services not started.

After 2 weeks of hard and hazardous work which has to be done by MS, without success, i decided to go back on Win 8 Pro x64 (not easy...) and i get again a fast computer.

The problem now is that, until october, MS has not aknowledged  these incompatibility between Win 8 and 8.1, so that we don't know if and when it will be fixed. So, it is impossible to expect or plan a safe update to Win 8.1 without problems.

I recommand to wait on Win8 untill MS provide a major release and declare these problems solved.

It is an incredible  big MS fault !

Jacques

Please kindly elaborate on what you did to delete old Win 8 files and "cleaned up hard disk and registry".

I updated from Win8  home premium to 8.1 in October and had no issues with the restart speed. My problem in restart after I installed an 80+ MB Windows 8.1 critical update about 2 weeks ago.  The restart now takes 5 minutes, although the start after powering up still takes well under 30 seconds. 

I used Dell's disk cleanup utility to clean up the hard disk and used  System Mechanics Registry tuner and unable to improve the restart speed.