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I have a user that uses chrome. They told me that it takes forever to load the first window, so I took a look. Sure enough it takes anywhere from 3-5 minutes for it to load even under a different profile. I re-installed Chrome and updated, but I am still having the same issue. I took a look at this post from 21, but it didn’t seem to have much more than a reboot and re-install as an option.
Google Chrome taking forever to start up - Software - Spiceworks Community

This post from 15’ just was clearing cache and cookies, but that should have been resolved by a re-install right? Chrome takes ages to load on startup

Once it is up, it seems fine, just the first load takes forever. Does anyone have any suggestions, or updated comments? The machine is a Windows 10 Enterprise N fully updated PC.

8 Spice ups
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Chrome is a resource hog on a good day.

What we don’t know is if Chrome is loading a specific homepage that might be causing this, if the user has extensions or plugs causing this.

What does it look like in incognito mode?

What is different with this device vs others? Different OU, Different policies, non-domain joined, home user device etc?

4 Spice ups
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Great questions Rod. The new tab page is what should be loading. We do not install extensions at all, and it is a domain joined PC. It is happening for multiple windows accounts. This machine is actually a fairly new machine (about 8 months old) and has 64gb ram. Even after a reboot and nothing else running it takes a while to load. I tried to load it incognito like you suggested before a normal window (I didn’t realize you could append -incognito to the shortcut to open it first) but that didn’t make it any faster. Opening an incognito after the main window opening is just fine.

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Has Chrome been reset (not uninstalled and reinstalled, but reset from within Chrome).

If you open task manager before opening chrome, what does CPU and memory look like, do either spike?

I dislike Chrome for multiple reasons, but greedy on resources is the main one. I expect it’s trying to pre-load frequently used pages so they load almost instantly after the initial application, but that doesn’t help until it’s open.

Turn off hardware acceleration, if this solves it, there is an issue with Chrome and the GPU drivers.
Settings > Advanced > System > Use hardware acceleration when available and turn it off

Rename the Chrome appdata cache folder, if there is an issue with Chrome’s profile, this wont help - this isn’t always cleared on removal of Chrome either.

C:\Users\[Your Username]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data ) and rename the “Default” folder to “Default.old”

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First, make sure hardware acceleration is turned off. Go to Chrome settings > System > disable “Use hardware acceleration when available.” That’s fixed launch lag on a few systems for me.

Second, check for any weird startup switches or forced policies under chrome://policy — sometimes stuff gets left behind by old installs or admin templates and causes delays.

Also worth looking at the default location for the user profile. If it’s on a redirected folder or network share, that can seriously delay Chrome loading. Try launching Chrome with a completely fresh local profile using chrome.exe --user-data-dir=C:\Temp\ChromeTest and see if that loads faster.

If that works, then the issue is probably with the profile path, login script delays, or GPOs touching Chrome-related folders.

And just to rule it out — check if there’s a scheduled task or startup item slowing things down overall. Seen security software hang Chrome on first launch too.

2 Spice ups
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How quick is the PC?
I had an older system that was having these issues.
I found killing the resident Adobe updater running in Task Manager, would allow chrome enough resources for it to be the dominant hog. Would be interested to know if you find similar.

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Did you mean Chrome does not start up or pages takes a long time to load ?

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I tried a reset, that didn’t seem to help.
The CPU seems to spike a bit (goes up 20-30% and power usage is very high).
Hardware acceleration has been turned off.
I just deleted the entire user_data folder, and it didn’t seem to help.

PC specs are:
Intel Xeon w3-2435 3.10GHz
64GB ram
Windows 10 Enterprise N 22H2
NVidia T400 4GB

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I’d probably give the user two options at this point.

Investigate further, but since it’s not a showstopper, here would be my options.

  1. Accept it takes a moment to load on first run / leave it open.
  2. Use another browser.
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Thanks for the feedback.

I made sure hardware acceleration is off.

Checked the policy page, and there is one policy set, but it is the same as on a much slower pc that opens right away.

The third thing you mentioned was very interesting, but unfortunately that didn’t seem to help either.

So far all I found was a google update under the Google directory for a scheduled task.

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It is a new system. I will check if anything Adobe is running upon launch. That would be interesting if that had anything to do with it.

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Chrome starts, it just takes forever to initially load. Honestly I am not wondering if it has something to do with this graphics card. I don’t have any other machines with this card in it.

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PC specs are:
Intel Xeon w3-2435 3.10GHz
64GB ram
Windows 10 Enterprise N 22H2
NVidia T400 4GB

What is the boot drive? I have seen this before on Win10 system running a HDD instead of an SSD. Once Chrome loaded it was fine, but that initial load was in the minutes. I imagine eMMC storage can do this too, but that is unlikely to be found in an old Xeon system such as this.

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That’s your answer right there. Go into the settings and tell it to release the memory when you close the tab. Otherwise even if you close the tab it keeps everything there which is why sometimes you could go in and see Chrome having 30 tabs open

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If you close chrome and reopen it, does it take 3 minutes again? I am asking because I experienced something similar to this. We are a public library and have around 1000 public computers for patrons to use. Occasionally we have to deal with this where on first launch of each session, it takes 3 minutes to load. To fix it, I run a script to launch Chrome, wait three minutes, then taskkill it. Then I have to copy over a new preferences file because it loads up on the next load as crashed. This fixes it temporarily. However…it comes back from time to time.

If you want to try it, launch Chrome and wait for it, then from command prompt, type “taskkill /f /im chrome.exe”. The next time you launch it, it will complain that it crashed, but you can just close that. I don’t think it will work for sure, but worth a try. It is a very annoying issue.

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uninstall it and switch to Firefox you will thank me later

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One solution that may work for you is to clear browser cache, if it doesn’t work uninstall and install chrome back..
Go to settings on Chrome, type “del” in the search bar and click on Delete Browsing data from the pop ups.
Then follow the steps below to clear cache by unchecking the first two boxes and then delete data:

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