Why do Dell laptops freeze on the BIOS screen during boot?
When Dell laptops join a domain, they wait on the SafeBIOS screen for about two minutes before loading Windows. This delay causes hourly employees to log in early and accumulate daily overtime just trying to start their computers.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Setting services to Automatic (Delayed Start)
- 2Telling users the slow behavior is normal for the environment
- 3Consolidating security agents and cleaning up group policy objects or Intune configurations
- 4disabling netlogon service on the laptop
- 5moving the machine to an Organizational Unit (OU) with blocked inheritance to avoid receiving Group Policy Objects (GPOs)
- 6recovering or resetting the BIOS settings to factory
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I have this strange problem where the Dell 16 ProPC16250 laptops have slow boot times.”source ↗
“The problem starts when the machine is joined to the domain. After rebooting it just waits on the Dell SafeBIOS screen for about 2 minutes before displaying the windows login screen.”source ↗
“Our Windows computer state is getting bloated with security and monitoring agents. I think we're up to 10+ with more inevitably on the way. Users are complaining of slow startup and general performance issues.”source ↗
“We have the data showing all these agents kicking off and trying to communicate bogging down CPU and Memory while average startup time and "Readiness" are creeping up to the 10-15 min + range.”source ↗
“the business is also pushing back saying their hourly employees are logging in early, collecting about 15 minutes of overtime a day, to account for the slow startup times.”source ↗
“I have three Dell 16 pros on my desk that I was trying to setup and all three have the same problem.”source ↗
Where this came up
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