A few months ago, with seemingly no reason (no hardware changes or incidents) my wife's gaming PC started pausing for 60 seconds+ before POSTing with the VGA fault light on. I tried everything, swapping GPUs, updating / resetting BIOS, replacing the CMOS battery, re-seating RAM and even the CPU itself, nothing worked. But it always POSTed, eventually. It's like it was memory training every time.
A few days ago it just stopped doing it, POSTing immediately like it hasn't done in months. WTAF
It makes me wonder whether Windows updates could cause / resolve something like this. I always assume the BIOS/POST sequence is too isolated for that to be the case, but with UEFI there's much more access from the OS - to the extent that updating a BIOS can now trigger a process in Windows on next boot (like asking you to install motherboard software). And I remember that Windows malware that could exploit your BIOS boot image. So perhaps it's possible?
Either way this has broken my mental model of troubleshooting a PC, I've never seen anything like it. I'm used to POST problems being hardware related, or BIOS settings related, not just randomly appearing after working fine for a couple of years, and then fixing themselves after a few months.
@sinbad Modern PCs are soooo complex it's a wonder they boot at all.
@sinbad Had any USB devices changed? I've had very long bios times when I have certain USB devices plugged in while booting. (Mainly certain flash drives)
@kojack Nope, she did get some new Steelseries headphones with a dongle 2 months earlier but it was fine. And I tried booting without anything except a keyboard attached and it was the same