Freebook i3-1215U -Long time until seeing Chuwi logo when booting

Laptops Freebook 360
1

My Freebook i3-1215U is functioning correctly but, on powering on, seems to take a longtime before seeing Chuwi logo and windows booting. Not sure if there is a setting in BIOS to speed up POST . Any ideas ?

2

Windows has a setting in its power settings I belive that switches from Fast boot to normal cold boot every time. Might be worth looking into.
One more probable option is that SSD is full and/or fragmented. You can clean it, but since Chuwi does cheap out on the SSD a bit and their disks don’t have any DRAM cashe wich makes them A LOT slower than a disk with the one i’d suggest buying a new SSD with DRAM cashe (Samsung’s are generaly the best).
If you never touched BIOS before I doubt something there is cause of slow boot-up.

3

The problem is unrelated to Windows - it’s concerning the time between pushing the power button and seeing the Chuwi Logo and the icon indicating that windows is loading. After pushing the power button, one can see that backlight of screen is on with blank screen but takes a few seconds before the Logo , etc is seen. I suspect that BIOS is set to have POST do full test rather than quick boot…

4

That might be the case if this is 15 year old laptop, but all new laptops do the full test on boot and they do it in less than a second. Post is fine, but it is windows, or more specificly the SSD (as I stated before)
To explain let me quicly explain the PC power on process:

  1. User pressed the power button
  2. BIOS comes online and checks if all critical components are working (PowerOnSelfTest, POST)
  3. BIOS scans all of the drivers and comperes it to drive bank (so it knows in which order to boot)
  4. BIOS lookes for boot files on the first drive untill it finds Windows Boot Manager (or GRUB if Linux)
  5. BIOS executes the Windows Boot Manager which in turn loads the Kernel (at THIS point windows loading cicrcle apears)
  6. Kernel loads the rest of the system

So why I said this is so I can explain that the reason it takes so long for the circle to apear is because Kernel is loading, and Kernel is composed of many little files that need to be read extremly quicly and often.

So now let me explain the diffrence between DRAM-less SSD and one with DRAM cache.
The SSD with DRAM cache saves the last thing computer requested in one super-fast chip (DRAM cache) so if computer needs it again it can be accesed extremly quicly without much waiting, while DRAM-less SSD doesn’t have this custody and instead every time the file is requasted it needs ot get same file, even if the file is just few bytes. DRAM cashe can make SSDs sequential reads up to 5X better than SSD without one, but as you might have guessed, they also cost more (~5$ more) which Chuwi cheaped out on and went with DRAM-less SSD.

What this means is that a program like Kernel which is critical for the PC to work right and that needs to be accesed so much, even more on boot, and it’s usually the same files that need to be accesed, workes 2-3X slower than if it was booting from SSD with DRAM cache. And being experienced it first hand, I belive you are experiencing same issue on boot.

1 Like