CantCompute

No, as @SquintyG33Rs says, its likely windows will not boot much faster than this. I guess you could try a very lightweight linux distro which may boot even faster but i'm not experienced with that

It is certainly one of the faster drives around. How long is it taking to boot. I'd be surprised if it was above 20-30s

It looks like your school has updated its policies to force anyone on its system to keep up to date. I’d ask your it department about it, they may have not thought about students home systems when implementing. Alternatively buy a windows key online and separate from your school system to gain full control again. 

Drives being turned off and on again is actually harmful and will kill your drives faster. You can disable this in the power settings under plan settings -> advanced plan settings -> hard disk -> turn off hard disk after (set this to 0 minutes)

If you have a spare drive around I would be tempted to try a fresh install of windows. It’s possible an update didn’t go right and corrupted some settings 

Ill try repasting as a first step, thanks for your suggestions. Id like to do a full water loop but think ill save that for when i put together a new build (hopefully soon!)

500~600W should be sufficient for most rigs (including yours). 

Update: Decided to give Intel XTU a try. It allowed me to enable the xmp profile. After a reboot both bios and XTU report 2666MHz although task manager still reports 2133MHz. thanks to both of you for your advice. I can't really feel the difference so am going to stop messing with it here but others may find this result helpful

no
 
 
No, if you have an intel cpu inside.