Does it normally take like 5 years for PoE to load?

You need a faster PC and good SSD optimized.

Laptops are jokes. Everything in them is slower except maybe SSD if you buy aftermarket.

SSD is what you need for quick load times. It also lets you completely boot your computer before you even turn on your monitor.

You are lucky you are not running a Mac port... takes 10 years to load here.

Loading between areas is OK. I beleive OP is talking about the initial loading, first time you turn on the game. Yeah, as i remember it this takes enough time to grow a stylish beard. Also where are the J. Lawrence nudes?

Thanks for the responses.

I'm no expert, but this has nothing to do with defragmentation of the hard disk or the game.
My hard disk is clean, there is nothing on my pc other than poe and win7. The game always loads in 10 seconds. But NOT the first time I start it: when I turn on the computer and start poe for the first time, it takes about 2-3 minutes to load. If I then quit and start poe again, it loads in 10 sec(repeatable, so this must be the norm).

It's like the launcher crashes for 2 minutes and then remembers its job, because when I kill the client before the game has finished loading (so anywhere in that 2-3min timeframe), I can actually start poe in 10 sec, like I normally can.

So if the issue is defragmentation, then it should always take the same huge amount of time to load.

I don't know what the launcher does on first startup after a reboot, but whatever it is, it would be a good idea to give the user some control or information over it, like implementing a time schedule for that action or a countdown until it has finished or something.
If it is NOT working as intended, then the game is buggy on my new PC and my old one and my laptop, because that giant-load-time-on-first-use-after-reboot-phenomenon is repeatable on all my computers.