On my i5-2400 with 8 GB of RAM and a 7200 RPM hard drive, it takes six seconds to start the first time and four seconds to start subsequent times. On my i5-355

On my i5-2400 with 8 GB of RAM and a 7200 RPM hard drive, it takes six seconds to start the first time and four seconds to start subsequent times. On my i5-3550 with 16 GB of RAM and an SSD it takes a couple seconds to start the first time and less than a second for subsequent times. Both machines are running Windows 10. Right now, the machine with the spinning rust is loading a bunch of files with an I/O priority of "background" because it just got booted into Windows; that might slow it down a bit because of the seek times and I don't know if Windows is willing to starve background I/O for seconds at a time to speed up interactive requests (I doubt it). Update: once all the background preloading is done, PowerShell restarts in three seconds on the spinning-rust machine. Long story short, I think getting an SSD will be the thing that makes PowerShell start acceptably fast.