Windows 10 W10 Pro Laptop suddenly cold boots slow (has SSD for C:)

The only thing I can come up with is that it is looking for an installed piece of hardware that it can not find and goes through many retries before it gives up and boots.
If you have not looked in device manger go there and see if any items have the yellow triangle.

Thanks for the suggestion with looking at the device manager. I completely forgot about that because W10 has made things so workable that I forgot about it. It did yield some results which I will detail below.

Here's where I'm at based on all suggestions.

I reviewed my startup items in my task manager (SSA = screen shot attached) and disabled a bunch of stuff. I compared it to my sysinfo software/startup programs (for the services the list is too long to get a screen shot - you'll have to check the updated sysinfo print out) category and there are things in that list that don't show up in my task manager startup either as enabled or in many cases disabled or at all. I disabled some items and test cold & warm booted with no change.

I looked at my BIOS everything is kosher

I checked the device manager as you suggested. That yielded some information that might be useful. I found a USB drive item listed with an alert on it (SSA) and went ahead and uninstalled it then scanned for HW changes (SFHWC) and it did not return. I continued looking down the list in the DM and found in the USB Root Hub category that there was yet another drive device in there that had an alert. I uninstalled that then SFHWC and that item did return again still alerting. (SSA)

This has lead me to a few theories that I am about to test out.

1) I have an old (really old) 3TB Seagate USB drive that I keep attached and it has for a long time been repeatedly dropping connectivity and resuming connectivity with. I am going to test out eliminating it and cold & warm booting.

2) I have a 10 plug USB strip that I keep attached because I use it constantly. I will try disconnecting that and doing the boot testing. I will report my results of testing my theories back here.

Thanks again for your suggestions. Please keep this thread open as it is still a work in progress.

Wonder Woman

Glad you have found a clue. I had this issue a few years ago with a USB hub for reading various SD, & compact mem cards that did this to me.
Best of luck!

I have a similar issue with my laptop. I installed a new ssd and replaced my cd drive with my old hard drive with the help of caddy. Now problem is the hard drive has SMART issues which shows it is failing(I tried to troubleshoot disk issues but it's if no use). As of now it works but this is causing slow boot. If I remove it everything works fine. Is there a way to specifically skip chkdsk during booting up for the old hard drive. (OS is in ssd). I like to have that hard drive inside my laptop for not so important files and save the hassle of keeping external drives.