When I look at these posts, one thing comes to mind: "Leave no stone unturned"
Maybe they worked on this kind of stuff before, but a lot of the changes in Windows 8 will be visible to even the most novice computer user (and that's a good thing if they're improvements, which most of them are).
The way they're doling the information out is also good, I think - showing the people who care about such things the way that the underpinnings of the OS are improving, while making sure that they don't get bogged down by details when discussing the Big Changes (the Metro UI, ARM support, etc.) at BUILD next week.
I do not know if I agree so much with that. The vast majority of users do not follow tech sites and the main stream media never reports on ANY thing microsoft related. Apple on the other hand hides things long enough that people cannot copy them. M$ often tells people about a feature SO long in advance that by the time they release it everyone has copied. I can think of many features in IE that were added to fire fox or plugins before microsoft released a new IE version.
it's one and the same. this is the new "startmenu" of your explorer (accessible trough the start key, too). there are no two modes, technically. switching was always instant in ANY presentation, absolutely fluid.
and yes, starting from hibernation is just as fast on win7, except for the hibernation file loading, which is much slower as it doesn't hibernate just the core os, but everything in ram.
and, nobody will care about explorer much afterwards anyways :)
You're wrong... it's not a new "start menu". MS have made this clear. Metro is an interface just for touch devices. Even MS have said that Metro will be inefficient for non-touch computers.
For laptops and desktops people will still use the explorer/desktop interface. Metro would be vastly inferior for these devices.
That's completely wrong. Since D9, MS has said that the "Start Screen" is the new main interface for Windows, regardless of whether or not the device supports touch. The traditional desktop isn't even loaded until it's needed (i.e. the user starts a "classic" app).
Yeah, it would be good if you could tweak how much space hibernation used or on what disk the hibernation file was stored.
I recently upgraded to 8GB of RAM and found I had to completly disable hibernation because the hiberfil.sys was using 6GB of space of my 74.4GB (after format) SSD and I only had a few GB left free.
For god's sake, can we please get this right? Your SSD is NOT "74.4GB (after format)". You bought a hard drive that was 80GB in size, NOT 80GiB in size. 80GB is approximately 74GiB. The manufacturer is correct; your OS is wrong.
If your OS is so stupid that it doesn't properly understand the difference between a GB and a GiB, complain to the manufacturer. But don't spread stories about how "formatting used up almost 8% of the drive".
Won't hibernation also cause additional wear on SSDs? I have an SSD in my Windows 7 box and hibernate it 1-2x per day. I have 12GB RAM so it tends to cause a lot of writing to the disk.
Unless you're running a DB server with a high load wear rates on SSDs are a non-issue.
Assuming you have all 12GB of ram in use (empty pages won't be written), and your SSD is 120GB in size you'd create 36-72 extra wear cycles/year via hibernating. Current consumer level SSDs are good for a minimum of 3000 cycles, so you'd be adding 1 or 2% wear to the drive yearly.
Jesus, I have an SSD (80GB) and I don't worry about it. It's good for something like 20 years of write cycles at moderately high usage. Think how far HDDs have gotten in 20 years - from 30MB (my dad's 1st PC) to 2 TB! By the time your SSD wears out, there will be much faster, larger 100 petabyte holographic storage or something and you'll have ditched your SSD long ago.
It's like driving a Ferrari at no more than 40mph to save on engine wear...
Indeed, my 24/7 machines and the ones I power on once a day when I start work truly benefit from fast boot times. I can just feel everything is snappier, videos encode quicker, Photoshop is lightning fast, even file copying is 12-18% faster.
That is complete BS and you should know it being on this site. I hope that was sarcasm when you posted it.
A faster boot time does not equal a faster computer in general. You can attest to that by getting a SSD drive. "Yah i'm in windows faster!!!..oh wait i have a 4 year old computer".
I go for the fastest possible boot will trying to trim the fat/bloat from a machine and especially I try to get 0% cpu time so when the machine DOES want to do something... it'll be faster and prepared to do so.
So... a faster booting WIndows 7 machine does equate to a faster machine overall. Thanks.
I go for the fastest possible boot will trying to trim the fat/bloat from a machine and especially I try to get 0% cpu time so when the machine DOES want to do something... it'll be faster and prepared to do so.
So... a faster booting WIndows 7 machine does equate to a faster machine overall. Thanks.
No, a clean and lean machine happens to include faster boot times in with the faster at other stuff too. Doesn't equate to a faster machine.
My laptop takes about 45 seconds to boot up, down from around 75 when I finally upgraded the hard drive to a 7200rpm. Once into Windows, everything else runs pretty much exactly the same. My videos encode at the same rates, etc. About the only other thing to decrease were the load times on some games, and again the hard drive performance did that.
The computer is the same speed it was before, only it takes 30 fewer seconds to get me to where it's the same speed it was before. It's not 'snappier' or 'faster' it just boots quicker.
I reboot about once a month, after Microsoft released the OS updates, and just put the computer in sleep all other times I'm away from it.
While I do enjoy the convenience functions shown off for Windows 8, as well as the presentation of them, I've yet to hear anything even moderately innovative - let alone groundbreaking.
Perhaps my standards are too high but I'm just reading 'meh' still.
So a full blown OS that will work on desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablets, and a load of other new mobile touch devices, as well as supporting ARM CPU's and having a totally new interface for touch is nothing ground breaking? WTF.
Theres NOTHING else like it. Win 7 barely offered anything over Vista but this is totally different. No other full blown OS offers all this stuff. What other version of Windows has had anywhere near as many changes? Then you've got Hyper-V which pretty much makes Win 8 the most backwards compatible version of Windows ever. And now we have stupidly fast boot times.
From what we know today it's the same thing under the hood anyway. At least all I've seen are minor convenience functionality (nice) and UI tweaks (not always good).
In comparison with other Windows versions it might be enough to get excited but I personally rate modern desktop OSs darn low on the scale of innovation, performance and functionality.
Of course my benchmark for a good desktop OS remains the now 20 years old AmigaOS 3.x. A high standard, certainly.
Although I have heard people make comments about the amount of time it takes to start up a computer, I wouldn't go so far as to say that they are complaints. Also, those are generally situations where only near-instant-on would really make a difference. Unless they can drop boot times (including POST) to 5 seconds or less, the time and resources put into this new "feature" would be better spent elsewhere.
The reality is, even if the computer only takes 10 seconds to boot, I'm still going to turn it on and then find something else to do (get coffee, organize my desk, make a phone call). I'm not going to sit there watching the POST and Windows animations.
For those of us wanting to keep their electricity bill down, faster boot times are a welcome site. It's not going to make or break my experience, but hey I just saved some time not waiting for my PC ... great!
I use my PC ~2-4 hours a day. Why in the world would I keep it running for 20+ hours eating up power?
Fastest I've ever managed is 15 seconds from off to desktop using a Crucal M225 64Gb SSD within an Acer 1820ptz. 15 seconds. Obviously I'd turned off a load of services and disabled a few features but I didn't go so far as to vLite anything.
P.s. No matter how fast Windows 8 boots motherboard makers had better remove the 12 second plus or minus from their own initialization process!
I'd be happy with only 12s from power switch to OS boot loader. My i7-950 takes almost 30s to get to that point (I think it was a bit faster before I overclocked it by ~50%); from there it's about 15s from not only being logged in but having my apps starting up.
Wouldn't it be more useful if it was an option on the shutdown menu instead of command line stuff? Other than that it's good to see Microsoft on a mission with W8.
No, because you shouldn't ever have to use that option. The default quicker boot is essentially equivalent to booting to a completely fresh state.
I think they only included it in the rare case somehow the saved contents of the hibernate file got corrupted and the "fresh" system state can't be trusted.
That is impressive for a PC with a full size CPU, but not so much for a tablet. My iPad starts and powers off pretty much instantly. If they want Win8 on a tablet they might need to work on shorten that process a bit more.
You're waking your iPad up from sleep. This demonstration was from a complete power-off. Hold the power button and shut down your ipad completely, then see how long it takes to start.
Reading a full memory and state file from disk is not fast, especially when it as a very large file. Hibernation is flaky at best and "lab results" often do not translate to the real world very well.
In addition adding a multi-gig (8GB, 16GB) hiberfil.sys to the system drive will now mean that windows, just windows, will take up a MINIMUM of 40GB - necessitating even larger system partitions.
if you had read the blog, you would see they aren't loading the entire memory state. They are only saving the kernel, services, registry, and driver information so that you can quickly load a "fresh" system.
Plus they are compressing and multi-threading the read of the hiberfil.sys so it happens as fast as possible.
You still have to log in so that it initializes the user session. That's why it's so fast to boot.
Did you learn to be such an ass, or were you born that way?
I read the blog, I read other articles on this. As I said, "lab results" frequently do not apply in production. I still do not trust MS on this - we shall see.
The slowest part of the boot process is reading the scattered files required for booting. Often they are tiny driver and service descriptors (4K files), hence why a SSD is much faster for booting, even without optimizing for it.
After you have sufficient IO, the next bottleneck is loading service dependencies. The fewer the better.
Reading a single, large and contiguous, hibernate file is much faster for the typical HDD if it contains the clean state of the system. That's why I believe Microsoft on this.
Linux has been doing this for a while now (with varying success). They preload the files into a single preload file, and also compress and read it as fast as possible.
I believe there are even OEM and third party utilities for Windows that do this. So basically Microsoft is just baking this into Windows 8.
I have Windows 7 installed on an SSD. The longest part of my boot is the POST and the Intel Storage/RAID screens, and that's with "Quick Boot" option enabled in the BIOS. It's a P67 mobo. Are EFI boards any faster? A lowly iMac with a mechanical hard drive boots OSX faster than my super duper PC.
As is now, my PC with fresh install of windows and nothing else on it, unconnected to the web, boots up in under 15 secs flat.
Then add the delays, login, various startup applications and connecting. That is what really makes the boot time so long, up to 2 minutes for me. Biggest Chunks of it for me, are: Firewall, anti-virus, video drivers and language packs (fonts and alternate keyboard layouts / characters included)
I reboot my comp when and BECAUSE I need to clear memory, for example, when I know I will have to do some business online, I will scan my comp, dump all temp files, etc. then reboot to clear memory and run with extra security precautions such as different browser with different security features and settings etc., in order to better protect my private information which I have to use for business.
If there is some malware or adware or something left over from regular everyday use, it usually gets cleared during a complete shut down and restart providing its startup is not in the registry or in the start up files, and the previous scans take care of that.
Now, if they make it so that memory gets copied to either HD or SSD before reboot, how will I be able to clear it if it just automatically reloads at start ? The 14 seconds windows boot time is irrelevant and I really do not see what is the big deal.
Will this feature have an on-off option ? Best case scenario I think would be if you could select specific apps to be "saved" in this manner if boot times are an issue, so that you can put your biggest time hogs in there, but once in a while you want to clear the memory, how will this be accomplished with this feature ?
If speed is an issue with powering up, then we'll put the computer in SLEEP mode.
As more than one person has stated here, sometimes we turn off a computer completely to clear out crap, reset the memory, an infection, whatever.
Want to improve boot times more so? Then do a better job of throwing out crap bloat code. Doing cheap tricks like this, which is basically forced hibernation which only shaves off 15~20 seconds... why bother?
Besides, were these tests performed on the same hardware? A HD today is a bit faster than those made 2-3 years ago.
And what of the boot up performance after installing normal 3rd party software?
It would be cool to see Anandtech benchmark the POST times of different motherboards. Every new motherboard review should test the POST times with different options (for instance, RAID on/off).
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dagamer34 - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
When I look at these posts, one thing comes to mind: "Leave no stone unturned"Maybe they worked on this kind of stuff before, but a lot of the changes in Windows 8 will be visible to even the most novice computer user (and that's a good thing if they're improvements, which most of them are).
Andrew.a.cunningham - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
The way they're doling the information out is also good, I think - showing the people who care about such things the way that the underpinnings of the OS are improving, while making sure that they don't get bogged down by details when discussing the Big Changes (the Metro UI, ARM support, etc.) at BUILD next week.PubFiction - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
I do not know if I agree so much with that. The vast majority of users do not follow tech sites and the main stream media never reports on ANY thing microsoft related. Apple on the other hand hides things long enough that people cannot copy them. M$ often tells people about a feature SO long in advance that by the time they release it everyone has copied. I can think of many features in IE that were added to fire fox or plugins before microsoft released a new IE version.stm1185 - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
I wonder if that is only to get to the METRO ui though. I wish they showed if explorer is just as fast to boot to.davepermen - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
it's one and the same. this is the new "startmenu" of your explorer (accessible trough the start key, too). there are no two modes, technically. switching was always instant in ANY presentation, absolutely fluid.and yes, starting from hibernation is just as fast on win7, except for the hibernation file loading, which is much slower as it doesn't hibernate just the core os, but everything in ram.
and, nobody will care about explorer much afterwards anyways :)
B3an - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
You're wrong... it's not a new "start menu". MS have made this clear. Metro is an interface just for touch devices. Even MS have said that Metro will be inefficient for non-touch computers.For laptops and desktops people will still use the explorer/desktop interface. Metro would be vastly inferior for these devices.
Spivonious - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
That's completely wrong. Since D9, MS has said that the "Start Screen" is the new main interface for Windows, regardless of whether or not the device supports touch. The traditional desktop isn't even loaded until it's needed (i.e. the user starts a "classic" app).steven75 - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
He's still correct (and daveperman is wrong) that the traditional desktop is a fully distinct mode, as clearly stated by Microsoft.B3an - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
In the comments the guy mentions that boot times are the same for either Metro or the Windows Explorer/desktopOS - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
a consequence of using partial hibernation is it will waste space on the disk, which is of bigger concern to SSD users with limited space.iamezza - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
Yeah, it would be good if you could tweak how much space hibernation used or on what disk the hibernation file was stored.I recently upgraded to 8GB of RAM and found I had to completly disable hibernation because the hiberfil.sys was using 6GB of space of my 74.4GB (after format) SSD and I only had a few GB left free.
code65536 - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
You CAN tweak it. In an elevated command prompt in Vista or Windows 7, type "powercfg /h /?" for the details...DanNeely - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
There's a way to change where the hibernation/swap files save to via control panel.IIRC it's under system-advanced, but I have hibernate turned off on this laptop because I don't have room after all the stuff I need for work.
name99 - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
For god's sake, can we please get this right?Your SSD is NOT "74.4GB (after format)".
You bought a hard drive that was 80GB in size, NOT 80GiB in size. 80GB is approximately 74GiB. The manufacturer is correct; your OS is wrong.
If your OS is so stupid that it doesn't properly understand the difference between a GB and a GiB, complain to the manufacturer. But don't spread stories about how "formatting used up almost 8% of the drive".
JNo - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
I concur. That would be another nice thing for them to change or give the option of in Win 8 - reporting disk space in GB instead of GiBGet to it MS!
titanmiller - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
Won't hibernation also cause additional wear on SSDs? I have an SSD in my Windows 7 box and hibernate it 1-2x per day. I have 12GB RAM so it tends to cause a lot of writing to the disk.DanNeely - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
Unless you're running a DB server with a high load wear rates on SSDs are a non-issue.Assuming you have all 12GB of ram in use (empty pages won't be written), and your SSD is 120GB in size you'd create 36-72 extra wear cycles/year via hibernating. Current consumer level SSDs are good for a minimum of 3000 cycles, so you'd be adding 1 or 2% wear to the drive yearly.
JNo - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
Jesus, I have an SSD (80GB) and I don't worry about it. It's good for something like 20 years of write cycles at moderately high usage. Think how far HDDs have gotten in 20 years - from 30MB (my dad's 1st PC) to 2 TB! By the time your SSD wears out, there will be much faster, larger 100 petabyte holographic storage or something and you'll have ditched your SSD long ago.It's like driving a Ferrari at no more than 40mph to save on engine wear...
imaheadcase - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
I never understood why people cared about boot time.I've never heard a customer complain of that, in fact most people i know leave them on 24/7. lol
damianrobertjones - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
Fast boot time can and will equate to a faster pc in general.Touche - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
Indeed, my 24/7 machines and the ones I power on once a day when I start work truly benefit from fast boot times. I can just feel everything is snappier, videos encode quicker, Photoshop is lightning fast, even file copying is 12-18% faster.Boot time FTW!
imaheadcase - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
That is complete BS and you should know it being on this site. I hope that was sarcasm when you posted it.A faster boot time does not equal a faster computer in general. You can attest to that by getting a SSD drive. "Yah i'm in windows faster!!!..oh wait i have a 4 year old computer".
Touche - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
C'mon :)damianrobertjones - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
Ok, instead of being sarcastic how about looking at this example that I prepared:http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-business-class-...
I go for the fastest possible boot will trying to trim the fat/bloat from a machine and especially I try to get 0% cpu time so when the machine DOES want to do something... it'll be faster and prepared to do so.
So... a faster booting WIndows 7 machine does equate to a faster machine overall. Thanks.
Touche - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
OMG! You're mixing apples and oranges, badly.damianrobertjones - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
Ok, instead of being sarcastic how about looking at this example that I prepared:http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-business-class-...
I go for the fastest possible boot will trying to trim the fat/bloat from a machine and especially I try to get 0% cpu time so when the machine DOES want to do something... it'll be faster and prepared to do so.
So... a faster booting WIndows 7 machine does equate to a faster machine overall. Thanks.
seamonkey79 - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
No, a clean and lean machine happens to include faster boot times in with the faster at other stuff too. Doesn't equate to a faster machine.My laptop takes about 45 seconds to boot up, down from around 75 when I finally upgraded the hard drive to a 7200rpm. Once into Windows, everything else runs pretty much exactly the same. My videos encode at the same rates, etc. About the only other thing to decrease were the load times on some games, and again the hard drive performance did that.
The computer is the same speed it was before, only it takes 30 fewer seconds to get me to where it's the same speed it was before. It's not 'snappier' or 'faster' it just boots quicker.
Exodite - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
This.I reboot about once a month, after Microsoft released the OS updates, and just put the computer in sleep all other times I'm away from it.
While I do enjoy the convenience functions shown off for Windows 8, as well as the presentation of them, I've yet to hear anything even moderately innovative - let alone groundbreaking.
Perhaps my standards are too high but I'm just reading 'meh' still.
B3an - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
So a full blown OS that will work on desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablets, and a load of other new mobile touch devices, as well as supporting ARM CPU's and having a totally new interface for touch is nothing ground breaking? WTF.Theres NOTHING else like it. Win 7 barely offered anything over Vista but this is totally different. No other full blown OS offers all this stuff. What other version of Windows has had anywhere near as many changes? Then you've got Hyper-V which pretty much makes Win 8 the most backwards compatible version of Windows ever. And now we have stupidly fast boot times.
Exodite - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
Not in my book, no.From what we know today it's the same thing under the hood anyway. At least all I've seen are minor convenience functionality (nice) and UI tweaks (not always good).
In comparison with other Windows versions it might be enough to get excited but I personally rate modern desktop OSs darn low on the scale of innovation, performance and functionality.
Of course my benchmark for a good desktop OS remains the now 20 years old AmigaOS 3.x. A high standard, certainly.
Tanclearas - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
Agreed.Although I have heard people make comments about the amount of time it takes to start up a computer, I wouldn't go so far as to say that they are complaints. Also, those are generally situations where only near-instant-on would really make a difference. Unless they can drop boot times (including POST) to 5 seconds or less, the time and resources put into this new "feature" would be better spent elsewhere.
The reality is, even if the computer only takes 10 seconds to boot, I'm still going to turn it on and then find something else to do (get coffee, organize my desk, make a phone call). I'm not going to sit there watching the POST and Windows animations.
mpschan - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
I care.For those of us wanting to keep their electricity bill down, faster boot times are a welcome site. It's not going to make or break my experience, but hey I just saved some time not waiting for my PC ... great!
I use my PC ~2-4 hours a day. Why in the world would I keep it running for 20+ hours eating up power?
name99 - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
Does your computer not have a sleep mode? Does it not work properly?damianrobertjones - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
Well...Fastest I've ever managed is 15 seconds from off to desktop using a Crucal M225 64Gb SSD within an Acer 1820ptz. 15 seconds. Obviously I'd turned off a load of services and disabled a few features but I didn't go so far as to vLite anything.
P.s. No matter how fast Windows 8 boots motherboard makers had better remove the 12 second plus or minus from their own initialization process!
powercfg.exe -h off
DanNeely - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
I'd be happy with only 12s from power switch to OS boot loader. My i7-950 takes almost 30s to get to that point (I think it was a bit faster before I overclocked it by ~50%); from there it's about 15s from not only being logged in but having my apps starting up.cfaalm - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
Wouldn't it be more useful if it was an option on the shutdown menu instead of command line stuff? Other than that it's good to see Microsoft on a mission with W8.hechacker1 - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
No, because you shouldn't ever have to use that option. The default quicker boot is essentially equivalent to booting to a completely fresh state.I think they only included it in the rare case somehow the saved contents of the hibernate file got corrupted and the "fresh" system state can't be trusted.
yankeeDDL - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
I am not a big fan of Windows, and even less of Microsoft, but I have to say that this looks interesting.ET - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
but if Windows 8 eliminates the need for a clean reboot on updates, that's a killer feature for me.lifeblood - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
That is impressive for a PC with a full size CPU, but not so much for a tablet. My iPad starts and powers off pretty much instantly. If they want Win8 on a tablet they might need to work on shorten that process a bit more.tipoo - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
You're waking your iPad up from sleep. This demonstration was from a complete power-off. Hold the power button and shut down your ipad completely, then see how long it takes to start.fhaddad78 - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
Microsoft needs to add an MS-DOS mode for power users... o.ODOS and DESQview - Go!
Candide08 - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
How about going back to the BASIC ROM option on boot up? ;)fhaddad78 - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
That would be in Windows 9Candide08 - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
Reading a full memory and state file from disk is not fast, especially when it as a very large file. Hibernation is flaky at best and "lab results" often do not translate to the real world very well.In addition adding a multi-gig (8GB, 16GB) hiberfil.sys to the system drive will now mean that windows, just windows, will take up a MINIMUM of 40GB - necessitating even larger system partitions.
hechacker1 - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
if you had read the blog, you would see they aren't loading the entire memory state. They are only saving the kernel, services, registry, and driver information so that you can quickly load a "fresh" system.Plus they are compressing and multi-threading the read of the hiberfil.sys so it happens as fast as possible.
You still have to log in so that it initializes the user session. That's why it's so fast to boot.
Candide08 - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
Did you learn to be such an ass, or were you born that way?I read the blog, I read other articles on this.
As I said, "lab results" frequently do not apply in production.
I still do not trust MS on this - we shall see.
hechacker1 - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
The slowest part of the boot process is reading the scattered files required for booting. Often they are tiny driver and service descriptors (4K files), hence why a SSD is much faster for booting, even without optimizing for it.After you have sufficient IO, the next bottleneck is loading service dependencies. The fewer the better.
Reading a single, large and contiguous, hibernate file is much faster for the typical HDD if it contains the clean state of the system. That's why I believe Microsoft on this.
Linux has been doing this for a while now (with varying success). They preload the files into a single preload file, and also compress and read it as fast as possible.
I believe there are even OEM and third party utilities for Windows that do this. So basically Microsoft is just baking this into Windows 8.
Zak - Saturday, September 10, 2011 - link
I have Windows 7 installed on an SSD. The longest part of my boot is the POST and the Intel Storage/RAID screens, and that's with "Quick Boot" option enabled in the BIOS. It's a P67 mobo. Are EFI boards any faster? A lowly iMac with a mechanical hard drive boots OSX faster than my super duper PC.veldrane - Saturday, September 10, 2011 - link
As is now, my PC with fresh install of windows and nothing else on it, unconnected to the web, boots up in under 15 secs flat.Then add the delays, login, various startup applications and connecting. That is what really makes the boot time so long, up to 2 minutes for me. Biggest Chunks of it for me, are: Firewall, anti-virus, video drivers and language packs (fonts and alternate keyboard layouts / characters included)
I reboot my comp when and BECAUSE I need to clear memory, for example, when I know I will have to do some business online, I will scan my comp, dump all temp files, etc. then reboot to clear memory and run with extra security precautions such as different browser with different security features and settings etc., in order to better protect my private information which I have to use for business.
If there is some malware or adware or something left over from regular everyday use, it usually gets cleared during a complete shut down and restart providing its startup is not in the registry or in the start up files, and the previous scans take care of that.
Now, if they make it so that memory gets copied to either HD or SSD before reboot, how will I be able to clear it if it just automatically reloads at start ? The 14 seconds windows boot time is irrelevant and I really do not see what is the big deal.
Will this feature have an on-off option ? Best case scenario I think would be if you could select specific apps to be "saved" in this manner if boot times are an issue, so that you can put your biggest time hogs in there, but once in a while you want to clear the memory, how will this be accomplished with this feature ?
Belard - Saturday, September 10, 2011 - link
If speed is an issue with powering up, then we'll put the computer in SLEEP mode.As more than one person has stated here, sometimes we turn off a computer completely to clear out crap, reset the memory, an infection, whatever.
Want to improve boot times more so? Then do a better job of throwing out crap bloat code. Doing cheap tricks like this, which is basically forced hibernation which only shaves off 15~20 seconds... why bother?
Besides, were these tests performed on the same hardware? A HD today is a bit faster than those made 2-3 years ago.
And what of the boot up performance after installing normal 3rd party software?
Nihility - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
It would be cool to see Anandtech benchmark the POST times of different motherboards. Every new motherboard review should test the POST times with different options (for instance, RAID on/off).