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

STR

[SmartSsa]

Suspend To Ram.

If you need to reboot, you're rebooting for a reason - likely because something in that "50 to 75 MB" has changed.

Of course, if your box doesn't support suspending to ram, then hibernation is an ok alternative. But sometimes hibernate can be just as slow, if not slower than rebooting.

end of line.

Re:Oh please.

[chaos421]

don't you think that if computers booted in 1-2 seconds, people would be more likely to turn them off when not in use? odds are, if your computer takes more than a minute or so to boot you won't turn it off say over lunch or during breaks. think of all the energy we could save? for the energy conscious out there, you could start by turning monitors off when not in use.

How about instant OFF?

[dpbsmith]

What gripes me more than slow startup is the idea that a computer can't be shut off quickly.

The last time we had a power failure at work, I tried to shut down my Windows machine, which was on a UPS. For some reason, the machine decided at that very exact instant... apparently _after_ I selected shutdown... that it would be a good idea to download and install a system update first! There did not appear to be any way to interrupt the process. Knowing that the batteries on the UPS weren't what they usta be, I quickly turned off the CRT to reduce the load, crossed my fingers, and hoped for the best.

It took the machine the better part of ten minutes to shut down. Fortunately the batteries held out. Heaven only knows what would have happened if power had been interrupted while it was in the middle of installing a system update.

Years ago the science writers used to tell us that we needn't be afraid of computers taking over the world because, after all, we could always shut off the power. Yeah, right.

Re:TVs don't need to do very much

[The_Wilschon]

Also, the hardware on a TV doesn't change. It just doesn't. So you don't really need any of the BIOS' going "Wtf? Who am I? Do I have arms and legs? no. Do I have a cd drive? yes. What time is it? Will there be cake?" If you go entirely to an instant on through complete saving of the boot configuration, you lose all of the plug and play goodness that everyone oohs and aahs about (that is, suddenly things won't Just Work (TM) anymore). If you swap out a hard drive, or add a new DVD+RW drive, your BIOS doesn't freak out because it asks at every bootup what its got. The OS doesn't freak out because it has hardware detection routines too. Anything that can change from one bootup to the next which makes any difference at all to the things that start running during boot must be detected. Try putting your computer into hibernate (suspend to disk), and then changing the amount of ram. Will it come back up out of hibernate nicely? I doubt it.

Re:They have instant coffee now.

[Curien]

Because people are stupid. If there were a specially-accessible (say, via the F8 key at startup on Windows) "re-detect hardware" boot option, and the default just went with whatever the OS already knew about, then people would first bitch about how "I put in a new soundcard, and Windows can't even see it!" And then when they learned how to detect it, they'd bitch about "Why can't Windows just do that automatically?!"

Seriously, you want an OS that does exactly what you want at boot time? Use Unix. You want something that works reasonably without you having to mess with it? Use Windows. Don't blame Microsoft for your own poor choices.