Windows 8.1 Pro Boot Camp installation laggy

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I recently put Windows 8.1 Pro on my mid 2012 MBP 15". It has 16 MB RAM and a Crucial M500 SSD. Yet it boots slower than a similar Window 8.1 Pro installation running under Parallels Desktop 9. It boots slower than Mavericks 10.9.1. Even the Chrome browser lags while loading.

Yet I am able to do some very CPU/disk intensive stuff, such as an ASP.NET based CMS, Sitefinity, that I've seen bring other development boxes to their knees. Doubt I could do that in my PD9 VM!

Any ideas?
 

chscag

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Open up your hardware tree in Windows 8.1 and see if you can identify which graphics processor Windows is using? It may be using your HD 4000 rather than the nVidia graphics. Also check to see what Windows is loading when it starts up and if you have any other devices attached that it has to recognize when it boots.
 
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skallal
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chscag: I managed to fix the lag. The solution was going into the Control Panel uninstall programs, selecting Boot Camp Services, and clicking Repair.

But I'm not sure if the repair is entirely what fixed it. First of all I tried different Nvidia drivers, but they wouldn't install. And I did the same for the Intel graphics HD 4000 drivers, and again they wouldn't install either. Yesterday day I downloaded the latest 5.1 Boot Camp drivers from Apple, which is the version I did the repair with.

For one, the control panel did not give an option to uninstall the Boot Camp Services. I find that odd. Also I don't know if the repair would have worked if I had not attempted to install the other drivers mentioned above first.

Also I find it odd that I can't use the Intel HD 4000 drivers. Under OS X that is the low-power device to use. It would be nice if I had the option to use both video devices under Boot Camp.

Bottom line: the repair mentioned above did seem to do the trick. But only if I could optionally use the Intel integrated video also, that would be nice. Also it didn't reduce the boot time. That is probably a side effect of the Boot Camp pseudo MBR partition scheme.
 

chscag

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Bottom line: the repair mentioned above did seem to do the trick. But only if I could optionally use the Intel integrated video also, that would be nice. Also it didn't reduce the boot time. That is probably a side effect of the Boot Camp pseudo MBR partition scheme.

You're not the only one who has complained about that, however, for some reason the Windows enumeration scheme does not adequately address dual graphics. Actually, it's best to have the more powerful graphics card (nVidia) up and running in Windows rather than the HD 4000. Of course the trade off here is battery life. But, since you resolved the lagging problem I'm sure you can deal with the nuisance of a shorter battery life.
 

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