Why Do Computers Take So Long to Boot Up?

An anonymous reader writes "Computers take too long to boot up, and it doesn't make sense to me. Mine takes around 30 seconds; it is double or triple that for some of my friends' computers that I have used. Why can't a computer turn on and off in an instant just like a TV? 99% of boots, my computer is doing the exact same thing. Then I get to Windows XP with maybe 50 to 75 megs of stuff in memory. My computer should be smart enough to just load that junk into memory and go with it. You could put this data right at the very start of the hard drive. Whenever you do something with the computer that actually changes what happens during boot, it could go through the real booting process and save the results. Doing this would also give you instant restarts. You just hit your restart button, the computer reloads the memory image, and you can be working again. Or am I wrong? Why haven't companies made it a priority to have 'instant on' desktops and laptops?"

Comments

Moo

[Chacham]

Mod me down, i don't care.

The person who asked this question is a moron. A computer is a piece of electroniuc equipment that can do billions of operations every second. We're down from a few minutes of boot time (remember how long it took an 8086 to boot? Counting through *all* four meg of ram!) to some seconds and he wants to know why it isn't instant.

Go read a book on how computers work. An old one such as Norton's Inside the 8086 should suffice (or whatever the name is.) The documentation is out there, if you really care, find it and read it.

But please, don't ask stupid questions. What next? Will people ask what acronyms stand for?

Re:hum

[AlHunt]

>Hibernation doesn't save any time when it comes back up to rebooting

This must be a YMMV thing. My P4 laptop pops back from hibernation in under 10 seconds even with several open programs. It's flawless (almost). This is the one thing XP beats OpenSuSE at.