I am experiencing fairly long boots of Cubase. The first boot after each Windows start is the problem. Every Cubase start after that is perfect. It seems to get stuck on the VST Plugin Manager part of the process.
Any ideas? Reaper zips through so I am tempted to say that there is not a duff or problematic plugin in there.
With Defender off as a proof of concept, the first Cubase start after each Windows boot is still quite long. All Cubase starts after the first one is much quicker.
Win 10 has a “fast start” feature which uses a hibernation file so that drivers and other stuff simple pick up where they left off at the last shutdown. As a result the first “cold start” of Win 10 is slower than than subsequent “fast starts”.
The behaviour you describe makes sense on Win 10 but you’re using Win 8.1 so there must be something else going on.
A slow drive would do that, the second time you start Cubase most of it would load from ram/cache. The drive could be slow because it’s nearly full, needs to be defragmented or is failing. Another reason could be eLicencer needs updating, same goes for iLok, if you use that.
The video related items take a, relatively, very long time to hadnle during start up in my set up (CB 8.5.15, W 8.1, Intell 6 cores, OS Windows and Cubase on SSD’s). Not after installing Cubase the first time on this system, but in time start up took longer,