Windows takes three minutes to start up with a hard drive. Is that not normal for Windows? Halfway it shows the desktop but is not really usable yet.

I fixed all my codec problems on Windows 7 simply by installing VLC, nothing else.
Windows is made to be restarted regularly but depending on the way you use it you may get away with like four times a year.

It’s a good idea, even once a week. If you have slow load times, get a fast SSD and possibly ram, I have a 500gb ssd for main drive and 32gb ram, has Windows, a few apps, and a few games on it. Have only noticed slow load with AC origins. others are pretty damn quick. Funnily enough windows takes a fair old time to boot on the main machine, on the acre predator laptop it’s about 1-2 seconds to boot, strange the difference.
Either way you can’t be so urgent to get them open you can’t wait a few seconds ;o)

Just any SSD.

Why have any, when you can have a fast one though? No-one buys a low end Aston Martin!

- ANY SSD is a fast one, compared to regular HDDs.
- Slower ones are often cheaper, while still more than fast enough (for me anyway, I don't run any software that makes use of anything faster than regular/low end SSDs (big databases e.g.). There are other aspects though - but that's a different context.
Anything higher than a certain transfer speed* only has marginally noticeable effects for anything else than specific use cases. OS and Gaming aren't among them.
- People with older computers usually don't have an M2 slot. I have 1 on my motherboard - so if I want another SSD after that slot is filled, it'll have to be a (slower) SATA one.

*nowhere as high as what NVME drives provide.

Anyway, your reply is a bit trolling. Do you have dual Xeon E7-8890 V4s in your PC? Because, why have any Intel CPU if you can't have the fast one(s)?.

Sorry, that was meant to be funny not start a debate on price versus speed.

Ah well, funny and writing on the internetz don't always work. ;-)

(maybe because I don't give a damn about cars? Who knows...)

You can also just restart every week or every other week....,,windows doesn't need to update every single day, so restarting isn't needed that often(well for most people, at least).

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That seems pretty decent, actually, though mine loads a bit faster(around 2 1/2 minutes or so). It is not that that makes some dislike rebooting, though, but the services/apps having to reload each time on startup......that can take awhile if you load many resource hogging apps.

I also use VLC for video playback and it also comes with many codecs as well which helps which other programs.

The don’t run so many resource hog apps? When did it become the normal to install everything available and leave it running all the time? It’s neither economical, nor good for your hard/software. Just install what you need to use.

I don't.....but the PC has low specs so even a few apps can bog it down.

I so do not miss that shit. For my newest PC I made sure that any and all HDDs got kicked to the curb; only SSDs allowed. With my NVMe system drive Windows 10 takes ~13 seconds to get to the desktop and it feels responsive right away.