Since at least two months, Windows 8.1 startup is awfully slow. From UEFI boot to login screen, it takes a few seconds, which is perfectly reasonable and what I expect from a Core i7 computer equipped with a SSD. However, after I was typing my password to login, it was taking between 30 to 45 seconds before I could reach the desktop! This was almost wiping out the benefit of the SSD, making the total boot time as long as if I had a regular hard drive with an older CPU.
I was getting annoyed on every startup, but at least, the machine was correctly responding afterwards. But yesterday, that combined with another issue: each and every Metro application is now closing instantly and NOTHING suggested on forum posts can fix the issue; the only solution seems to completely reset my user account.
I thought the slow login time was also linked to my user account and was starting to feel ready for creating myself a clean account and starting from there. Most applications should survive this process, only some settings will be lost. My documents live on a second hard drive which wouldn’t be affected. However, I found out that the slow startup was also experienced for a new user account! This was thus a system issue, probably yet another program that installed malware without me noticing it.
Searching on forums, it seems I would now have to hunt for and install many different anti-virus and anti-spyware programs and regularly create hard drive images. I didn’t have to run into this trouble while I was using Windows 7? What changed in Windows 8.1? Is the system now so unstable that I would need to regularly restore from an hard disk image? This is a real non-sense!
Deeper analysis of the slow startup seemed to link this to CPU! There was little hard disk activity during the long login time and CPU fan seemed to increase speed. I was quite shocked at this. I have a Core i7 CPU that works very well for Ubuntu. Why would Windows 8.1, suddenly, require something more? It was working six months ago, starting quickly. My Nuance ultrabook, which also has a Core i7, starts at normal speed. My personal ultrabook, equipped with a Core i5, starts in a reasonable time as well. Both machines are equipped with Windows 8.1 and newer than this 2012 Core i7, but they are NOT significantly more powerful! Do I really have to face the fact there is a time bomb in Windows, that will trigger after some time and start marking some CPU/motherboard combinations as arbitrarily obsolete? This makes little sense, but I was slowly but surely drifting to that conclusion. I was awfully disappointing because it takes me weeks to shop for new computer parts, check for compatibility with Linux, make sure I won’t get into a dead end with the motherboard, assemble the thing, test, solve issues, etc. I didn’t want to reenter into this just because Microsoft decided I would have to do so!
I didn’t want to perform a clean install, because it is taking too much time. It would break my GRUB configuration while Ubuntu provides no simple way to restore it (each time I need to search more than fifteen minutes, and apply a manual procedure), would require installing multiple drivers each rebooting the machine, and I wasn’t sure Ableton Live would correctly reauthorize. But I was starting to feel ready to try this reformat during the Christmas holidays, because this was becoming too annoying.
I thought about purchasing another system and moving the Windows 8.1 part of my current configuration on it, leaving only Ubuntu on the original machine. That would remove the issue with Windows breaking the GRUB setup at the cost of more money and space.
I also got issue with my audio system. Yesterday, I started Ableton Live and opened up a Live set I got from my friend. I got an error message, because my Ultranova synthesizer was set as the ASIO audio interface but it wasn’t powered up. Instead of turning it on, I switched to the M-Audio ASIO driver, so sound played through my main Fast Track Pro interface.
Things went well… until I closed Live. After that, for the third time, sound stopped working. The M-Audio driver is getting corrupted and stops working. Restarting the machine does nothing; I really had to reinstall the driver.
But after I removed this damned M-Audio driver and restarted the computer, I found out the startup speed was restored to normal! I reinstalled my M-Audio driver, because I need it for ASIO integration, and startup speed remained normal!
I thought about finding an audio interface more suitable for Windows 8, but I found out it makes no sense to replace a working product just because Windows misbehaves with it while it USED to work! I thought about downgrading to Windows 7, but I HATE its low contrast between selected and unselected items and lack of any solution to fix this without disabling Aero. I considered the possibility of installing Live on a dedicated Windows 7 laptop (tired of assembling computers and when purchasing preassembled PCs, you usually get to choice between cheap desktops, reasonable laptops or high-end desktops with too stylish gamer-centric cases). But the new machine would have low storage so I would need some kind of NAS for my systems to access a common storage. That was starting to be endless stacks of problems! I thought about using my Ultranova as sound card for Windows and M-Audio on Linux (because the Focusrite-based audio chip in the Ultranova does not work under Ubuntu) but that was resulting in need for endless reconfiguration (when switching between the two OS).
But today, things are still working. It seems I just must not use the Ultranova ASIO integration in Live and things will continue working. As a workaround for this uncommon issue, I connected the S/PDIF output of my synth to the S/PDIF input of my audio interface using a plain basic RCA cable (nothing fancy), turned on S/PDIF output on my Ultranova and was able to get the digital audio from the S/PDIF input of my audio interface. This has the added benefit of allowing Live to record BOTH from S/PDIF and the main input jacks of the audio interface. Using this new configuration, I was able to record four tracks at a time: the two one from my synth through S/PDIF, and the two outputs of my Korg’s EMX. S/PDIF input has low volume for I don’t know why, but at least this can be worked around in Live.
I hoped that would solve my Metro issue but no, the problem persists. I tried a lot of stuff to solve this without success. I will thus need to reset my user account if I really need these kind of useless Metro apps. At least startup is now normal so I won’t have to format to get this fixed!