Slow Boot After a Driver Update? What Actually Causes It

Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc, open Startup apps, and sort by Startup impact. After a driver update you will usually find one or two new entries near the top carrying your hardware maker's name. Disable those. Your display keeps working.

And while you are on that screen, ignore the number in the top right corner — because it is not measuring what everybody thinks it is.

"Last BIOS Time" has nothing to do with Windows. It counts the seconds your firmware spent identifying hardware and running its self-test before Windows started at all. It is finished before a single driver loads.

So no driver, no startup app, no Windows setting and no cleaning tool can change that number. It is structurally incapable of moving. And it sits on the same screen as the startup list, in bold, which is why people spend entire evenings disabling things to shift a figure that was never theirs to shift.

Around three seconds is normal on a modern machine, and ten or under is fine. If yours is high, the answer is in your firmware settings, not in Windows.

The thing that actually got slower after your update is further down this page, and it is not the driver.

Three Evenings Chasing the Wrong Number

A customer told Jake his desktop had become slow to start after an update, and that he had been working on it himself for three evenings without getting anywhere.

He had been thorough. He had disabled startup programs one at a time, restarting after each. He had cleared temporary files, run a disk cleanup, uninstalled two programs he no longer used, and tried three registry tweaks he had found. After every change he checked the same figure in Task Manager, and after every change it read almost exactly the same.

The figure was Last BIOS Time: 21.4 seconds.

Nothing he did moved it, because nothing he did could. That number was finished before Windows started — it belonged to his motherboard's firmware, not to his operating system. Three evenings of careful, methodical work aimed at a reading that was structurally incapable of responding to any of it.

And it sits directly above the startup list, in bold, on the same screen you are told to go to when your PC starts slowly. Nobody who reads it that way is being careless.

Ethan's response when Jake described it: "Microsoft put a firmware stopwatch on the Windows tuning screen and labeled it in a way that invites exactly that mistake. He wasn't wrong to chase it. He was told to, by the layout."

The actual cause took Jake four minutes: the graphics driver update had added two startup entries with Intel's name on them. Disabled, restart, desktop ready in about eight seconds.

The 21.4 seconds is still there, incidentally. It always will be, and it never mattered.

What That Number Is, and What It Is Not

Starting a computer happens in three stages, and they are frequently mistaken for one another.

Stage	What happens	Can Windows affect it?
Firmware = "Last BIOS Time"	Your motherboard identifies hardware and runs its self-test. Windows does not exist yet.	No. Not at all.
Windows boot	The kernel loads, drivers initialize, services start, the sign-in screen appears.	Yes — drivers and services live here.
Startup apps	After the desktop appears, your startup programs load behind it.	Yes — and this is where you win.

The complaint "my PC takes ages to start" almost always describes stage three, because that is the part you sit and watch. The number Task Manager shows you in bold describes stage one, which finished before any of it.

If your Last BIOS Time genuinely is high — well above ten seconds — the fixes are in firmware and worth knowing, but they have nothing to do with your driver update. Common causes are fast boot switched off in the BIOS setup, network or PXE boot enabled and waiting for a response that never comes, and drives being probed one at a time. You reach those by pressing Delete or F2 during startup, not from inside Windows.

So set that number aside. The next question is what your machine is actually doing, and there is a real measurement for it.

Measuring What Actually Happened

Windows records how long each start took, and reading it converts a feeling into a fact.

1. Press the Windows key, type Event Viewer, and open it.
2. In the left pane expand Applications and Services Logs → Microsoft → Windows → Diagnostics-Performance, then click Operational.
3. On the right, choose Filter Current Log and enter 100 in the event ID box.
4. Each entry is one start. The description gives the boot duration in milliseconds — divide by 1,000 for seconds.

Two things usually surprise people here. The first is that the number is lower than they expected, often considerably. The second is what that gap means.

Windows shows you the desktop before it has finished. Your wallpaper and taskbar appear while startup programs are still loading behind them, so the machine looks ready and behaves like it is asleep. That interval is not boot time and it will never appear in the boot measurement — but it is entirely what "slow to start" feels like.

Which means the fix is not a faster boot. It is fewer things loading after it.

Jake asked Ethan whether it was worth telling customers their machine is measurably fine when it plainly feels slow to them. Ethan was blunt about it: "Never lead with the number. If you tell someone their PC boots in nineteen seconds while they're sat watching it do nothing for a minute, you've told them they're imagining it. The number isn't there to win the argument — it's there to tell you which minute to go and look at. They're right that it's slow. They're just pointing at the wrong stage."

The Real Culprit: What the Driver Brought With It

A driver is a small piece of code that lets Windows talk to hardware, and it loads during stage two whether you like it or not. Drivers are rarely the slow part.

What arrives alongside a driver is a different matter. Graphics driver packages in particular install a control panel application, a notification tray icon, and one or more background modules — and the installer adds them to startup without asking. On Intel systems these carry names like the Graphics Command Center or an igfx module; on AMD and NVIDIA systems the equivalents are their own control suites.

Those are stage three. They load while you are watching the desktop, and they are what got slower.

1. Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open Task Manager.
2. Open the Startup apps tab — on Windows 10 it is simply Startup.
3. Click the Startup impact column heading to sort by it. High sits at the top.
4. Look for entries carrying your graphics maker's name that you did not choose to add. If the Publisher column is hidden, right-click the headings and turn it on — it makes the culprits obvious.
5. Right-click each one and choose Disable. This stops it starting with Windows. It does not uninstall it and it does not touch the driver.
6. Restart — genuinely restart, do not shut down and power on — and see how the desktop feels.

You keep the driver, the resolution, the performance and the display outputs. What you lose is a tray icon and any hotkeys that utility offered, and you can still open the control panel from the Start menu on the rare occasion you want it.

Leave two categories alone while you are in there: anything belonging to your security software, and audio drivers if you actually use their control panel. Everything else is reversible from the same screen in about four seconds.

If that fixed it, you are finished. If it did not, the driver itself is worth suspecting after all.

When the Driver Itself Is the Problem

A driver can genuinely slow stage two if Windows has to retry loading it, or if it waits on hardware that does not answer promptly. That shows up as a long gap before the sign-in screen rather than a sluggish desktop afterwards, which is a useful distinction.

The narrow fix is a rollback: Device Manager → the display adapter → Properties → Driver tab → Roll Back Driver. Seconds, and reversible.

If that button is gray, Windows no longer holds the previous version — it keeps only one and discards it during cleanup. That is not a fault, it just means you install the manufacturer's driver deliberately instead, from your laptop or motherboard maker's support page rather than the chipset vendor's generic package.

Then stop Windows putting the slow one back, which it will, often within hours. That has its own ordering trap: you must uninstall the driver first and hide the update immediately afterwards, because the tool can only hide something currently being offered. Our guide to stopping Windows reinstalling a driver covers the sequence and the Microsoft tool that was never added to Settings.

And if the update broke more than speed — a device that stopped working entirely rather than merely slowed — our post on hardware that stops working after an update covers the same replacement mechanism from the other direction.

The One Windows Setting That Cuts Both Ways

Fast Startup saves part of the system state to disk when you shut down and reloads it at power-on, which is why modern machines start in seconds. Usually it helps considerably.

On some machines it does the opposite, and there is a specific reason it matters here: because a shutdown saves and restores state rather than starting fresh, a driver that loaded badly can be restored in the same bad condition every time. Turning the machine off and on again preserves the problem rather than clearing it.

So if things got worse right after a driver change and nothing above has helped, switching Fast Startup off for a few days is a reasonable experiment. Our guide to turning Fast Startup on or off has the steps.

Be honest with yourself about the result, though. If boots are no better after a few days, turn it back on — leaving it off costs you real seconds every single start for no benefit, and "I turned something off once while troubleshooting" is how machines accumulate small permanent penalties.

When It Was Not the Update After All

Updates get blamed for a lot, partly because they are the only change you were told about. These are worth checking before you conclude the driver did it.

Cause	How to tell	What to do
The update is still finishing	Only the first one or two starts were slow	Nothing. This is normal. Judge it on the fourth boot.
Startup apps accumulating	Twenty-plus entries in the Startup list	Disable the heaviest five. They compete rather than queue.
A failing drive	Minutes rather than seconds, plus general sluggishness	Run wmic diskdrive get status as administrator. Back up first if it is not OK.
A spinning hard disk, not an SSD	Always been slow, update just made you notice	An SSD is the single biggest improvement available to that machine.
Pending updates queued	Windows Update shows items waiting for a restart	Let them install fully, then measure again.
Network drives or printers reconnecting	Long pause on the desktop, usually in an office	Disconnect mapped drives that no longer exist.

Row one deserves the most attention because it prevents the most wasted effort. Windows finishes installing during the next start, rebuilds caches and re-optimizes files it replaced. One slow boot right after an update means nothing. Wait for the third or fourth before you start investigating anything.

What Not to Bother With

Search this problem and a familiar set of suggestions appears. They are not malicious and some of them were once useful, but they will not help you here.

The boot timeout and menu delay tweaks. Reducing a menu timeout only helps if a menu is being displayed, which on a single-operating-system machine it is not. You will change a number and see nothing.

Boot optimizer and startup manager programs. Almost all of them disable startup entries you could disable yourself in Task Manager, and a good number add a startup entry of their own to do it. That is a net loss.

Registry cleaners. They have never demonstrably improved boot time on modern Windows, and they can remove entries something later needs.

Disabling services on a list from a forum. This is the one that causes lasting harm. Those lists are written for different Windows versions and different hardware, and disabling the wrong service produces failures weeks later that nobody connects back — a repair tool that will not run, updates that stop installing, Bluetooth that vanishes.

Everything genuinely worth doing here is built into Windows, takes a few minutes, and is reversible from the same screen you did it on.

What This Page Used to Be

This post went up in December 2016 after the same thing happened to us: a machine started taking noticeably longer to reach the desktop, and an Intel display driver update through Windows Update turned out to be responsible. The fix we published was to stop the driver's startup item from loading, and that advice was correct.

It is still correct. It is the Startup apps section above, and it is still what fixes most cases.

What the original did not do was explain why it worked, or name the distinction that makes it make sense — that the driver and the applications shipped alongside it are different things, loading at different stages, and only one of them was ever the problem. Without that, the advice reads as a trick rather than a diagnosis, and a reader whose case was slightly different had nothing to reason with.

It also said nothing about Last BIOS Time, which was not on the same screen in 2016 in the way it is now, and which has since become the single most misread number in Windows.

So the steps have barely changed. The page is now about the reasoning around them, and it is aimed at any driver update rather than the one from that particular December.

Your Questions, Answered Straight

What is Last BIOS Time in Task Manager?

It is how long your firmware spent identifying hardware and running its power-on self-test before Windows started at all. It measures the seconds before Windows exists. No driver, no startup app and no Windows setting changes that number, which is why people spend evenings trying to move it and never do.

What is a normal Last BIOS Time?

Around ten seconds or less is typical, and roughly three seconds is normal on a modern machine. Higher usually means firmware settings rather than Windows: fast boot disabled in the BIOS, network boot enabled and waiting, or drives being probed one at a time. Those are changed in your firmware setup, not in Windows.

Why did my PC get slow to start right after a driver update?

Usually not because of the driver itself but because of the helper applications the driver installer added to startup. Graphics driver packages routinely install a control panel, a tray icon and a background module, and those load while you are watching the desktop appear. The driver is doing its job; its companions are what you are waiting for.

How do I see what is slowing down startup?

Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc, open the Startup apps tab, and read the Startup impact column. Sort by it. Anything marked High that you did not deliberately choose is a candidate, and after a driver update the new entries are usually near the top with the hardware maker's name on them.

Can I disable a graphics driver's helper apps safely?

Yes. Disabling them in Task Manager stops them starting with Windows and does not touch the driver, so your display, resolution and performance are unaffected. What you lose is the tray icon and any hotkeys that utility provided, and you can still open the control panel from the Start menu when you actually want it.

Should I roll back the driver instead?

Only if disabling the helper apps does not fix it. Rolling back is a bigger step and it costs you whatever the update fixed. Device Manager, the device, Properties, Driver tab, Roll Back Driver. If that button is gray, Windows no longer holds the previous version and you would need the manufacturer's installer instead.

How do I measure my actual Windows boot time?

Open Event Viewer and look under Applications and Services Logs, Microsoft, Windows, Diagnostics-Performance, Operational. Event ID 100 records boot duration in milliseconds for each start. That is the real measurement, and it usually shows a machine that is faster than it feels.

Why does my PC feel slow even though boot time is short?

Because Windows shows you the desktop before it has finished. Startup applications continue loading behind a screen that already looks ready, so the machine appears to be sitting there doing nothing while it is in fact still working. The fix is fewer startup applications rather than a faster boot.

Does Fast Startup make booting faster or slower?

Usually faster, but on some machines it does the opposite, and after a driver change it can preserve a bad state instead of clearing it. If startup got worse after an update, turning Fast Startup off for a few days is a reasonable test. If nothing improves, turn it back on rather than leaving it off for no benefit.

Will disabling startup apps break anything?

Rarely, and nothing you cannot reverse in seconds. Leave anything from your security software alone, and leave audio drivers alone if you use their control panel. Everything else can be switched off and switched back on from the same Task Manager screen if you miss it.

Is a slow boot a sign my hard drive is failing?

It can be, and it is worth ruling out rather than worrying about. Open Command Prompt as administrator and run wmic diskdrive get status, which should report OK. If a machine that used to start in seconds now takes minutes and the drive is a spinning disk, that is worth taking seriously regardless of any driver update.

Should I use a registry tweak or a boot optimizer to speed things up?

No. The popular timeout and menu-delay tweaks change numbers that were not costing you anything, and boot optimizer programs mostly disable startup items you could have disabled yourself while adding a startup item of their own. Everything worth doing here is built into Windows and takes minutes.

Why does the first start after an update always take longer?

Because Windows finishes the installation during that start, rebuilds caches and re-optimizes files it just replaced. One slow boot immediately after an update is expected. Judge the machine on the third or fourth start rather than the first, and only then start investigating.

Can too many startup apps really make that much difference?

Yes, and it accumulates invisibly. Every program that adds itself to startup takes a share of the same disk and processor at exactly the same moment, so twenty small programs compete rather than queue. Removing the five heaviest usually produces a bigger improvement than any single setting change.

Does this apply to Windows 11 as well as Windows 10?

Yes. Task Manager, Event Viewer, Device Manager and the Fast Startup setting work the same way on both. Windows 11 renamed the Startup tab to Startup apps and moved a few screens, but every step and every measurement on this page is identical.

When is it genuinely worth reinstalling Windows for a slow start?

Almost never, and certainly not for this. If startup is still poor after clearing startup apps, checking the drive and testing without Fast Startup, an in-place upgrade repairs the system while keeping your files and programs. That is an hour, and it is the heaviest step this problem should ever justify.

Worth Reading Next

Revision note. Originally published December 22, 2016, about an Intel display driver update that slowed one particular machine. Rewritten and re-aimed August 22, 2026 for Windows 11 and Windows 10, at the same web address. The original fix — stop the driver's startup item loading — was right and is still the first thing to try. What is new is the reasoning around it: the three separate stages of starting a computer, why Last BIOS Time cannot be changed from inside Windows, how to read your real boot duration in Event Viewer, and an honest list of the popular tweaks that do nothing. If your machine behaves differently from what is described here, please write in with your Event ID 100 boot duration and your Last BIOS Time — those two numbers together explain most cases. And if you have spent evenings chasing a figure that would not move: it was never going to, the screen invited you to try, and you were not doing anything wrong.