Win11 is dog slow. Even on ssds. Maybe it is linked to the insane number of svchost.exe instances and telemetry processes. Try running Win 11 on a SMR spinning disk.

Windows 7 had a good chance of being installed on spinning disks. I think even the cheapo Win11 systems at Walmart have SSDs now.

Windows 7 never took minutes to boot on a reasonable computer.

>Windows 7 would take minutes to boot.

Citation needed. I went from Win7 on a i5-2500k that booted in sub 15 seconds on a SATA SSD to Win10 on a 5600x that takes 45 seconds to a minute to boot an NVME drive.