Vent: A motherboard swap turned a 10 minute boot into instant on

I've been working on older Dell Optiplex desktops for a local school district. Six months ago I swapped a bad motherboard on a 2015 model with a refurbished board from a 2017 unit. The difference in boot time was night and day - it went from taking almost 10 minutes to load Windows to about 30 seconds. I think it was a combination of the newer BIOS firmware and better capacitor quality on the later board. Has anyone else seen that big of a jump from just swapping out a motherboard in the same case?

2 comments

2 Comments

drew_thomas913d ago

Man, that's a solid upgrade. I've seen it a few times swapping boards in older office PCs. Usually it's the cheap caps on the old boards that start to go bad or the BIOS just gets too bloated over time. You got lucky the 2017 board was a drop-in, some of those Dell boards have weird power connectors that don't match up. I'd check the BIOS settings on the new one too, sometimes they have the boot order set to scan all drives and that can add seconds compared to a hard set SSD as first.

mason.margaret13d ago

And that's exactly the kind of thing I see all the time, @drew_thomas9. It's like how my old car started acting up after a few years, but a simple tune up and it ran like new, but most people would just scrap it.