Windows 8 takes 4-5 mins to boot even after clean install.

Thank you for your replies. The cpu is the Intel i3 3217U and I think normal boot times for similar laptops I had were around 45 seconds. I am wondering if there is a particular process which hangs on startup causing the 4 min delay. I tried to find the particular bootup process taking this long using a boot analyzer but I only see that "system" takes most of the time. Any ideas how to track down the culprit? And should I enable superfet for Windows 8 as well? That link only shows Windows 7 and Vista.

Here is what it says in the event viewer for my latest boot up:

Log Name: Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance/Operational
Source: Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance
Date: 7/10/2014 10:31:50 AM
Event ID: 100
Task Category: Boot Performance Monitoring
Level: Critical
Keywords: Event Log
User: LOCAL SERVICE
Computer: MannanPC
Description:
Windows has started up:
Boot Duration : 240600ms
IsDegradation : false
Incident Time (UTC) : ‎2014‎-‎07‎-‎10T17:26:37.852401700Z
Event Xml:
<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
<System>
<Provider Name="Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance" Guid="{CFC18EC0-96B1-4EBA-961B-622CAEE05B0A}" />
<EventID>100</EventID>
<Version>2</Version>
<Level>1</Level>
<Task>4002</Task>
<Opcode>34</Opcode>
<Keywords>0x8000000000010000</Keywords>
<TimeCreated SystemTime="2014-07-10T17:31:50.555833800Z" />
<EventRecordID>194</EventRecordID>
<Correlation ActivityID="{1ADF1571-9C64-0002-D515-DF1A649CCF01}" />
<Execution ProcessID="1592" ThreadID="1400" />
<Channel>Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance/Operational</Channel>
<Computer>MannanPC</Computer>
<Security UserID="S-1-5-19" />
</System>
<EventData>
<Data Name="BootTsVersion">2</Data>
<Data Name="BootStartTime">2014-07-10T17:26:37.852401700Z</Data>
<Data Name="BootEndTime">2014-07-10T17:31:34.305036000Z</Data>
<Data Name="SystemBootInstance">55</Data>
<Data Name="UserBootInstance">45</Data>
<Data Name="BootTime">240600</Data>
<Data Name="MainPathBootTime">177300</Data>
<Data Name="BootKernelInitTime">18</Data>
<Data Name="BootDriverInitTime">1241</Data>
<Data Name="BootDevicesInitTime">123172</Data>
<Data Name="BootPrefetchInitTime">0</Data>
<Data Name="BootPrefetchBytes">0</Data>
<Data Name="BootAutoChkTime">0</Data>
<Data Name="BootSmssInitTime">10239</Data>
<Data Name="BootCriticalServicesInitTime">7453</Data>
<Data Name="BootUserProfileProcessingTime">1656</Data>
<Data Name="BootMachineProfileProcessingTime">4772</Data>
<Data Name="BootExplorerInitTime">18813</Data>
<Data Name="BootNumStartupApps">6</Data>
<Data Name="BootPostBootTime">63300</Data>
<Data Name="BootIsRebootAfterInstall">false</Data>
<Data Name="BootRootCauseStepImprovementBits">0</Data>
<Data Name="BootRootCauseGradualImprovementBits">0</Data>
<Data Name="BootRootCauseStepDegradationBits">1024</Data>
<Data Name="BootRootCauseGradualDegradationBits">1024</Data>
<Data Name="BootIsDegradation">false</Data>
<Data Name="BootIsStepDegradation">false</Data>
<Data Name="BootIsGradualDegradation">false</Data>
<Data Name="BootImprovementDelta">0</Data>
<Data Name="BootDegradationDelta">0</Data>
<Data Name="BootIsRootCauseIdentified">true</Data>
<Data Name="OSLoaderDuration">2101</Data>
<Data Name="BootPNPInitStartTimeMS">18</Data>
<Data Name="BootPNPInitDuration">123706</Data>
<Data Name="OtherKernelInitDuration">1926</Data>
<Data Name="SystemPNPInitStartTimeMS">125456</Data>
<Data Name="SystemPNPInitDuration">1075</Data>
<Data Name="SessionInitStartTimeMS">126709</Data>
<Data Name="Session0InitDuration">1690</Data>
<Data Name="Session1InitDuration">366</Data>
<Data Name="SessionInitOtherDuration">8182</Data>
<Data Name="WinLogonStartTimeMS">136948</Data>
<Data Name="OtherLogonInitActivityDuration">15108</Data>
<Data Name="UserLogonWaitDuration">8137</Data>
</EventData>
</Event>

Yup. Still takes a long time.

Updated all drivers and ran a test on the hard drive. Hard drive, processor, and ram all passed tests (granted I didn't run them for too long).

It still took as long to boot after a clean install. Also tried boot repair previously and it didn't help. It is a pretty new laptop. Specs are in the link below. It has a 3rd gen i3 processor, 6gb of ram, 500GB hard drive, and an optical drive.

http://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/K56CA/specifications/

Going to test out the hard drive with seagate seatools and report back.

After eliminating all other possibilities, I tried to install a fresh copy of Windows 8 from an OEM iso file and it installed fine and the computer starts up in about 30 secs now. It turns out that the recovery partition installed on my laptops hard drive might have been corrupted so when I recovered the windows installation from there, it recovered a corrupted copy. Thank you all for the suggestions and helping me figure this out.