[golf1052]

I just timed the boot speed for my Windows 11 desktop. Once with a regular shutdown, once with fast startup disabled (which was introduced with Windows 8). 10-12 seconds to get to the login screen (after typing my BitLocker password). 7 seconds to login using face authentication. I do have very modern specs (Ryzen 9 5900X, 32 GB RAM, Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus) but my suspicions are that your boot speed could be dramatically reduced by just upgrading to an SSD.

Here's metrics from Tom's Hardware comparing an HDD to two types of SSDs (SATA and NVMe)[1] on a Windows 10 machine. The HDD had a boot time of 42.9 seconds. The SATA SSD a time of 17.2 and the NVMe SSD a time of 16.1 seconds.

With the advantage of fast startup the HDD machine was able to boot under a minute but the SATA SSD still cut the boot time of the machine by nearly 2/3rds.

1. https://www.tomshardware.com/features/ssd-vs-hdd-hard-drive-...