I have an old windows machine for playing WoW not happy with the Linux methods, but some day... and it does not have an SSD. I found one thing that helped was to disable a lot of the logging. In powershell on an administrator account:

  wevtutil el

then select some or all of the logs to disable with

  wevtutil sl {logname} /e:false

Another improvement since I only use it for WoW was to disable the spectre mitigations [1] remove some bloat with bleachbit [2] and then defragment the drive. Windows 10 specifically can be sped up a little bit by disabling some of the telemetry that is hidden away using O&O ShutUp10 [3] and improving network latency a little bit with the TCP/IP optimizer [4] as some startup applications rely on a response from servers. Now it starts up the same as when it was new. Maybe some day I will get a SSD. Another thing I found useful for Windows 10 was to disallow applications from running in the background which just "Suspends" applications rather than quitting. Suspending still takes up memory and pagefile. It's easier to see this in Process Explorer [5] I think they do this to mimic the behavior of a cell phone. Disabling suspending is less useful for startup time and more useful if you value your free memory.

One more thing I should add that helped was to cache DNS on my home network.

[1] - https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm

[2] - https://www.bleachbit.org/

[3] - https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

[4] - https://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php

[5] - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sysi...