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I finally fixed the slow boot on old Optiplexes by unplugging one thing nobody thinks to check
I had a stack of six Optiplex 790s from a dentist's office in Toledo sitting on my bench for two days, and every single one took close to four minutes to get to the login screen. I swapped drives, ran memory tests, cleared out startup junk, even reimaged one from scratch, and it still crawled. On a hunch I pulled the DVD drive out of one and the boot time fell to about 45 seconds. Turns out the SATA controller was polling the optical drive on every boot and waiting on it. I tried it on the other five machines and got the same result, every one of them boots fast now with the drive just sitting on a shelf. The dentist only ever used those trays for billing software on a disc they stopped using in 2019. If you work on a lot of old business desktops, it is worth the two minutes to test. Has anyone run into a similar hang from a card reader or some other dead peripheral?
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anna4911mo ago
Man, I always figured those old DVD drives were harmless if nobody used them, just dead weight sitting there. But your post made me rethink that completely. I had a similar headache with a Dell desktop that took forever to boot and it turned out the BIOS was hunting for a bootable disc in a drive that had nothing in it. Same deal with a USB card reader left plugged in, the board was waiting on it like an idiot every single time. Now I yank anything the machine does not need before I even start testing, saves me hours of chasing ghosts. Good catch on the dentist PCs, that polling thing is sneaky and I would have blamed the drive or the OS first too.
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