Hey Mitchell. I was looking online about your particular model. There might be variants of it, but for the most part, it seems to be high low-end spec machine about in the $400 US price range.
Perhaps it is normal for that machine to take about a good 2 minutes to boot to working desktop. I would tend to think so since your troubleshooting steps and updating drivers combined did not seem to help much at all.
My father has a netbook which I setup completely myself on a formatted hard drive. There's no bloatware or anything like that. It's has all my personal speed tweaks etc..
It still takes a little over 2 full minutes to get to a working desktop from a cold boot state.
Hope this helps somewhat.
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Another idea I just had is that you could install ProcessMonitor and put a shortcut to it in the startup folder. Upon a reboot, you can use to to see what exactly is using the hdd i/o to such a high extent. Let us know what you find and we'll see if it's normal or not, and if there's something that could be done about it.