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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?"
hibernation?
~~~ Paf. Le chien.
It is because until now, you haven't submitted your question to Slashdot.
... so what little embedded hardware they have doesn't take long to boot up.
On the other hand, my Toshiba HD-A1 HD-DVD player, which I believe runs Linux, takes as long to boot from its flash ROM as my XP box takes to boot from a cold start. I imagine the Blu-Ray players aren't instant-on, either. This is something we will just have to get used to, I suspect.
I think a large portion of the delay is initializing and setting states for all the hardware. Reducing the kernel and libraries to an image might speed things up, but not by much. It'd be about as fast as starting up from hibernation mode.
If you want a quick start, just use sleep mode. Takes very little power and you're up in seconds.
"Why can't a computer turn on and off in an instant just like a TV?"
My new HDTV takes about a minute to boot. Something about an ATI bios
I triple boot NetBSD, FreeBSD and x86 Solaris on my old desktop with an Athlon XP processor, and 512 MB of RAM. I don't recall off-hand the exact processor speed.
Regardless, NetBSD is the fasted of the three. It takes a little over 6 seconds from power-on to the login screen. FreeBSD takes 11 seconds. Solaris is a bit longer, clocking in a 14 seconds. I know these times because I was curious of this question as well, and so I did the timings. All three systems are basically the default installs, plus whatever initialization file changes there have been from installing various pieces of software.
Solaris does start into X, so that may be why it takes longer. Still, adding the 2 or so seconds it starts to get X running, NetBSD and FreeBSD are still less than Solaris.
Hibernation, as almost everyone's pointed out, works fine, unless you *need* to reboot for an install, crash, etc. In taht case, geez, 30 seconds? Cry me a river, how often do you actually need to restart?
There are two reasons why your suggestion won't work.
First, let's say that you upgrade some hardware. There will be no way for the OS to know that there's new hardware unless it goes through the hardware detection and configuration stages of bootup, which is what takes most of the time. Worse, if it doesn't do this, the system will probably just crash, as the memory image loaded will have the wrong set of drivers installed and they'll be pointing at the wrong set of hardware addresses.
Second, and this is more of a recent issue, there is a lot of work that's going into randomizing memory addresses to increase security. In the event of a security hole, randomized memory addresses make it far more difficult to take control of the machine as a hacker, virus, or worm can't use a hard-coded memory address during the attack. With a pre-built boot-up image, the memory addresses will not be randomized, which defeats a lot of the gain of this security benefit.
That said, you could just use hibernation on your computer. That is essentially the same thing as what you're asking for. A desktop is just as capable of sleeping or hibernating as a laptop is. The only thing is, if you want to make any hardware changes, you must remember to turn on the machine and do a complete shutdown first.
Also, there are companies who are focusing on bootup speed. In fact, every major Linux distro has been focusing on it for the last year or two. It's unfortunately just not that easy to speed things up without sacrificing stability or functionality.
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.
It's just Crap.
it appears that some, including samsung do care and are looking to the future of speeding up boot times.
personally, i think this is a fantastic idea. i really love the fact that my powerbook can go from sleep mode to on in under a second. however this takes quite a bit of battery power to accomplish. wouldn't it be much better if they wrote out the memory to flash when the lid closes? then instead of sleeping, you'd be able to shut down and re start very quickly.
I've spent a lot of time using Windows in virtual machines. For VM platforms that provide on-demand block allocation for virtual disks you can see a typical Windows boot do wild things like write to 250MB worth of blocks that were previously unused (i.e. the virtual disk grows by 250MB). NB: I'm talking about an ordinary boot, not one following installation of anything. It gets harder to see as virtual disk occupancy increases but it's an eye opener.
Some will say hibernation gives the same facility, but (at least with Windows) a clean boot needs to be done fairly often (when using a Windows development box, I reboot it daily).
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.
Indeed.
In the beginning, say from Edison's development of the electric lighting system, through the invention of the fractional-horsepower motor which enabled the development of home appliances such as vacuum cleaners and washing machines, most things started up in a fraction of a second.
Then came vacuum-tube-based electronics, which took a minute or two to warm up.
Then came the "solid state" revolution, and, once again, things started up instantly. WIth the exception of television sets, which had a vacuum-tube-based "picture tubes" in them. However, manufacturers soon developed circuits that kept a small amount of current flowing to keep the filament partially warm while the set was "off," producing "instant-on" televisions.
Early hobbyist computers were instant-on, too. Before diskette drives were common, the machine had everything it needed to boot stored in ROM and was up displaying some kind of welcome prompt within a fraction of a second. Even when the serpent entered Eden in the form of "operating systems," startup was quick. When you turned on an 48K Apple ][+ with a diskette drive and spiffy Apple DOS 3.3, there was a brief "whish" as the disk spun and loaded a few K of code into the processor, and there you were.
It seems to me to be lazy design that says that booting consists of more than loading code into RAM and establishing state for the internal hardware. I have no idea why OSes must churn away for big fractions of a minute _running_ code. Why can't it just load a snapshot of the desired final state of RAM?
What really gripes me is that lately Windows and Mac OS X have taken to presenting an empty _illusion_ of a faster startup. What seems to be happening is that all the minute-long processes still churn away, but the processes that present the UI run in parallel. The result is that the visible desktop gets into a displayable and interactive state quickly. But while the UI seems to be ready, nothign else is... particularly anything to do with the local network. If you actually try to do anything on that desktop, you still encounter minute-long delays.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I think you are perhaps using the wrong OS. If you want a linux console within 3 seconds of power on, use this:
http://linuxbios.org/index.php/Main_Page
The truth is, this subject is an old one. The main answer is that it just takes time to get a DHCP lease, set up a few dozen services, and generally get all of the "junk" you need up and working without crashing the system. If your main complaint is Windows XP there are a few tuning guides that can reduce your boot time dramatically.
(I hope I have this story right...this is from memory)
The story goes that the engineer working on the boot sequence for the original Mac was working late one night when Steve Jobs wanders past and asks how long the thing takes - the engineer is pretty happy that he's gotten it down to around 30 seconds (or however long it was) and that's probably good enough. Jobs then comments that they'll probably sell at least a million of these things - and each one will probably be booted a couple of times a day - and the machines will last maybe five years - so if he can save just one second more from the bootup time - that's equivelent to 113 years from the lives of Mac owners. So if you can save just one more second - that's like saving someone's life.
Talk about pressure!
But it's a serious point. The amount of human lifetimes that are wasted waiting for PC's to reboot is pretty horrifying - and there's a lot more than a million of them. Someone should take this seriously.
www.sjbaker.org
Hate to imagine the amount of human lifetimes lost on slashdot...
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
As a friend of mine used to say ...
I used to boot up my computer when I had nothing to do.
Now I have nothing to do when I boot up my computer.
All I ask is a warm bed, a kind word, and UNLIMITED POWER
Around 30 seconds?
I work for a large Fortune 500 company which does IT consulting. My work-issue laptop comes with a lot of baggage, including anti-virus, anti-spyware, automatic backup & disaster recovery, a special system update program, et cetera, et cetera.
How bad is it? It's like this: I can start my computer, and within about a minute, I get a standard XP pro login screen. After entering my username and password, I immediately get up and walk away, down a flight of stairs, out the door, and about a hundred yards to our campus cafeteria, where I'll buy a coffee. By the time I get back, my coffee is cool enough to drink, and my laptop is usually in a useable state.
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.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
If Windows didn't go through the complete boot process each time how would it come up with random reasons to crash?
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Bah! I think you forgot: "Get off my lawn!"
The thought: "You Generation M (microwave oven) kids need to quit demanding everything on demand" is one which discourages advancement in technology. No matter how good something is, it can always be better. Life used waiting for a needed device to power-on is life wasted.
It's called "hibernate."
Sleep works amazingly well on my G4 powerbook and osx. Its the only computer that I've owned that I can repeatedly put to sleep and expect to 'wake up'.
Obviously, you've never used a Mac. Get one, and all the "suckitude" (that's related to power management, at least) will magically disappear.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
That's one of the things that always amazed me about OS X. You can fault it for various reasons, but by god, you shut the lid on your iBook, and five seconds later, it's in zzz mode (with a battery life of about two weeks - I tested that once). Open the lid up, go "one, one thousand..." and it's awake and ready to use. I've tried this on some of the newer Intel-based MBPs and regular MBs, and it works just as well. So Apple has it dialed. What gives with the rest of the computing world? My stupid Latitude has such a buttfargled ACPI that windows goes "Derr, BSOD" when I try to use hibernate, and of all the Linux distros I tried on it, only Kubuntu came close to doing it right. The problems it encountered at wake-up were sufficient that I finally gave up on hibernate (as well as Kubuntu - on to a better KDE distro), and simply have it blank the screen when I flip the lid shut. It's good for about four hours that way, which is usually enough.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
Jef Raskin, creator of Macintosh and Canon Cat (the latter embodied his instant-on ideal), also complained about the time it takes a computer to start up.
Startup times have not changed in several decades. Here are some data points I collected a while ago:
you had me at #!
Get an IBM ("Lenovo"). Suspend and wakeup work perfectly well on my x41 (running Linux).
http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_05c.
-William Brendel
"I blame it on our slow ass hard drives."
Slow? My ordinary, everyday IDE drives can read over 60 megabytes per second. That could fill my PC's entire memory in about fifteen seconds.
I suspect the real problem may be that the operating system is still paging in small parts of DLLs and programs rather than loading them all in one go. Loading 4k pages one at a time made sense when the operating system was a couple of megabytes, but when you're loading a hundred megabytes of crap off the disk just to get to the desktop, you'd be much better to load the entire thing in one go; disk seek times have improved by a factor of two or three in the same time that disk read speeds have increased by maybe a factor of a hundred.
Does Windows still do that?
I really don't know if it's that great of an idea to turn of a computer over lunch. One of the hardest things on a computer (hard drive, motherboard, power supply, you name it) is starting up. That's when most hardware failures occur. Shutting the computer down for an hour at a time and rebooting is going to shorten lifetimes of your hardware. I think when that hard drive fries it might well take more energy to construct a new hard drive and restore backups, etc, than you probably would have saved during those 30-60 minutes x however many days.
same with my ibook g4, i just put the lid down and walk away. it always wakes up. on the powerbook hd, and macbooks (incl pro), sleep actually stores a hibernate image on the disk so that if you either 1) run out of battery or 2) manually pull the battery out (lets say on a long intl flight) and put in a new one. If you do a wake when you haven't killed of the power source (99% of the time really), it uses the RAM to continue operation. If you've disconnected power for whatever reason, it will wake up, present a little loading bar (incl a screenshot of your desktop if you don't require a password to unlock your computer from sleep/screensaver). Heres an Apple doc on it: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302 477
I always wondered where this setting was...
honestly, this is like the dumbest possible way to ask why we can't have faster boot times.
Ok, maybe not. The dumbest possible way is probably something like:
"why can't the compujigger turn on faster, like the whatchamavision?"
but still, it's pretty damn close.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
I've got a modern RCA 32V220T (or something like that) 32" xbox-link ready CRT tv- anyway- you push the power button and the tube stays blank for at least 6 seconds, and a relay or something inside clicks a few times- sometimes it tries to show up and clicks and goes black, and does that maybe twice before actually showing the picture. If it has been used recently, it clicks once and the picture shows up in about 3 seconds.
IMHO, my TV is defective and really sucks... never buy one- we replaced one due to a discoloration that appears on white screens, and decided it wasn't worth paying the best buy idjits to haul the stupid thing away a second time (yes, they charged me to haul a defective TV) when it showed the same blue and yellow problem. (bright white over the affected areas produces yellow on the right and blue on the left). I've been told this is a grille problem, that as it heats up, it bends and the wrong colors show up. Anyway- that's all unrelated- my point is, my tv is hardly instant.
What you're describing is mostly solved by hibernate; save the entire state to disk, and when you start up again, some mini bootloader restores the state. Doesn't mean others haven't tried different stuff. WinXP took some steps to make a first boot go faster. Put files accessed on boot somewhere special for faster access, etc. Cut boot down to.
But the basic problem is one of disk throughput and memory usage. There's a hell of a lot of stuff used on boot. CPU usage is secondary to pulling things off of disk. Unlike other computer systems, your desktop isn't intended to run programs directly off of ROM. It's intended to run a variety of applications, and accept a variety of underlying hardware. Since neither nor the hardware is designed to run a specific application from ROM, you can't just start with an assumed operating system or program.
Also, to bring up a nit, your TV only starts up instantly because it's halfway started most of the time. Turn it off for a long time or unplug it and you'll see it take a while to "warm up". This uses quite a bit of power. If you felt like it, you could pay extra to build a motherboard etc that supports suspend for desktops, but it takes a lot of effort to get the software right, so its primarily done for laptops. It'd be a nice comprimise between booting/hibernating and "instant on" that you want.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Today I have an HP Jornada 820 built in 1999. It runs Windows CE, and it turns on faster than anything. You hit the on/off button and you are either on or off just like that. --Best of all, it holds open all of your documents and programs exactly as you left them. I feel confident not saving stuff because it's so rock-steady reliable. The little critter is run on Flash memory; no hard drives.
My PC. . ? Well now. . , that beast is slow. Very slow.
I thought electrons moved at the speed of light, so what's the hold up? I refuse to blame the hard drives; those things are usually faster than Flash memory. So what's up? Bloat-ware? Too much hardware to configure? Poor programming? All of the above?
I don't know, but I suspect that if engineers had their act together and were not constrained by the ridiculous way of doing things which are currently in place, we'd have much better machines available.
-FL
I mean, all those gears and counterweights can't be that slow, now can they? Wait...
Well, if everybody just stared at their screens and drooled while they booted, I guess you could say something was being wasted. Except for all the quality drooling time, of course.
The CRT filament-maintenance bias trick was done for awhile in the 60s and 70s, but it was eventually recognized for the waste of energy that it is. What happens nowadays is simply that the rest of the signals are not applied to the CRT until the cathode has warmed up. This improves the tube's service life, and avoids the "expanding dot" effect that you'd see on older TVs that brought all the tube voltages up at once.
Linux on an embedded system configured for fast booting(without plug and play peripherals etc) can boot in 2 seconds or so.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
According to Anandtech, booting with the i-RAM into Windows XP takes 9.12 seconds.
CRT TV's turn fast because the tube has a bias circuit to keep it warm. When turned "OFF" most TV's burn about 5W to keep the tube warm for fast start.
No, they do not "keep the tube warm". Yes a TV might draw a few watts when in "off" mode due to the power supply for the digital logic section always being on. But just about every CRT based TV or monitor I have seen, except for maybe some real high end broadcast equipment, takes a few seconds for the tube to come up.
You definitely weren't around in the 60's and mid 70's when we watched the tube warm up and the displayed image grow from a small dot to the full size of the screen. Sometimes it would take 20 or more seconds before the picture stabilized. When you turned the TV off you got to watch the "boot" process in reverse as the display shrunk to a dot. It was a big deal when we got "instant-on" TV's.
Well yes, TVs used to take longer to fully power up, and didn't have dampening circuits to prevent CRT display after being turned off. They where basic fully analog devices, there was no logic that prevented the display of an image when the CRT was not yet in an operational state. In the 60's they would have been vacuum tube based (as in the whole TV, obviously a CRT is a vacuum tube) and taken a long time to fully warm up, and needed adjustment and retubing on a regular basis. In the 70's they would have been transistor based, and would have come up much faster, how ever they would still be fully analog and subject to the same power up and power down effects.
Modern TV's have digital control sections that can compensate on the fly for variations in the analog sections of a CRT display, and higher performance switching power supplies and fly-back circuits that come up to operating voltage much faster. But you still have at least a short wait for the CRT to come up, they are not kept on warm idle of any kind. At least not in any displays I have worked on.
I know this is probably getting off topic, but your post was marked +5 informative yet has miss information in it. Having worked on many CRT displays I just wanted to point out that the CRT is definitly not kept on any kind of warm stand-by, none that I have ever seen any way. What you are describing sounds similar to the stand-by mode in most guitar tube amps, where the heater filaments in the tubes are kept on to keep the tubes warm but the rest of the amp is powered down. I am not aware of this being done in modern CRT displays. Seems to me that if you did this it would dramaticaly shorten the CRT's life span, if the heater filaments were on 24x7x365. Someone correct me if I am wrong...
I've got an old Apple Colorsync seventeen-inch CRT (presumably a Sony Trinitron tube, judging by the wire shadows on the screen) hooked up to my beige G3, and it takes at least fifteen seconds to come on.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
If everyone did a few situps, pushups, jumping jacks, whatever while waiting for a shutdown + restart to happen, I wonder what the overall health impact would be? 1 second could turn into 1 jumping jack, which would be 113 * 365 (days in a year) * 24 (hours in a day) * 60 (minutes in an hour) * 60 (seconds in a minute) jumping jacks. 31536000 jumping jacks. How many lives would be so much more prolonged by that amount of jumping jacks? What impact could that make on the high obesity rates in America (guilty as charged...)?
Perhaps those lifetimes aren't wasted by necessity but by negligence, laziness, and choice.
I find XP refuses to hibernate with more than about 600MB of active memory; it makes an attempt, then returns you to the desktop with a popup bubble saying "Insufficient resources exist to complete the API". This necessitates me closing all my apps before each hibernation, and after a week or two even that won't work.
:)
Anyway, I remember using something closer to what the story is talking about, on the Amiga of all places; FastBoot had you boot normally, then save a snapshot of the system at the end of the startup-sequence. Future boots would use this snapshot, which you generally didn't want to update at each shutdown -- you got 2-3s boot times, but each boot was clean. It worked surprisingly well for a scary hack
I just spent 30 seconds reading your post.
YOU BASTARD!
The bottom line is that the fraction of wasted time stays the same no matter how many people you consider. I hate it when people try to prove a point not worth proving by considering a large population. (That's not what you were doing, it's what Steve was doing. I'm criticizing his and other's logic, not your post.) It's usually an argument used by alarmists to try to get something shutdown (ironically enough). For example, did you know that every year HUNDREDS of lives would be saved if we outlawed backyard pools? How can you let hundreds of people die?!? Well, if a hundred people die in America from something, I consider that an incredibly safe activity. Anyway, to bring it back to topic, I rather enjoy the down time I spend waiting for my PC to boot. It's like a free few minutes where nobody expects anything from you.
On a good day I can boot the Encore 32/67 machines at work in under a minute, but at least with a Windows PC I don't have to punch raw machine code into the front panel to clear memory and run the IPL.
It may not be done in modern displays, but about 25 years ago I had a quick-on TV where I could definitely see the orange glow of the tube filaments through the rear vents even when it was turned "off".
The big delay in returning from either of these modes is waiting for wireless 802.11g internet connection to wake up and set all its parameters correctly, get an IP address from the WAP, etc. If I know I'm going into my office, I can avoid that by turning off the wireless before closing the lid, and Ethernet is finally smart enough to just ask for DHCP every time it gets connected or wakes up.
The other issue I have is that I normally use a VPN to connect to work, and the VPN tunnel doesn't like getting shut down and restarted, especially with a different IP address, so I still have to re-authenticate by typing in my security token code to the VPN client.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
An increasing amount of hardware is using firmware. To save cents, many of these devices are being sold without flash to store this firmware, and are relying on the OS to load the firware into the device on every boot.
This means that the OS must upload the firmware on a restart, or full hibernation. While it is conceivable that a system could be implemented to do this, and leave the device in a conistant state, it sounds like a tedius, error prone setup, that is likely to cause no end of problems.
Of course, you could do away with the problem by making us all pay an extra quater-cent for a few k of flash, like a sensible hardware vendor.....
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Absolutely right. After your machine has been off for an hour almost all the oil has drained back into the pan, so it isn't lubricating the engine like it should be. You're better off letting it idle over your lunch hour.
Dean
.....don't you think that if computers booted in 1-2 seconds.....
There are computers that do this RELIABLY every time. They are called Macs. Mine is set to automatically sleep if there is no meaningful activity in 15min, such as user input, down or uploading or playing music. It takes 3 seconds to come back to normal operation. This return includes reconnecting to services such as Instant Messenger and checking for new email. So if you are energy conscious get a Mac and save the planet.
All theory is gray
I use a mac powerbook G4 laptop. After a quick scan of the wtmp.x files, my average time between reboots is about 7 or 8 days. Let me translate: I reboot my laptop once a week. Outside of reboots, it goes to sleep, and wakes up in 1-2 seconds. I almost never wait for my computer any more (since I got my new 2g -o- ram).
I think the real question here is not "why do reboots take so long?", but why do you need to reboot so often. The people who design your OS are working to minimize reboot time, but at some point you will have to do a fresh cold boot to set the system up from scratch.
The tools to save that state are not good on windows (see title).
Why does so much of normal proceedure in Microsoft require a reeboot? (see title).
Why are windows OS's so unstable? The answer to this is clear - see title above.
- A 'normal' cold boot of my PC takes about a minute
- 'Hibernate' takes about 20 seconds
- S3 Standby takes about 6 seconds.
One catch is that by default most systems use 'S1' mode for standby, which keeps the machine semi-alive including the CPU fan, power supply fan, etc. You can often go into the BIOS, change the default standy mode to 'S3' -- this will shut down the entire machine (including fans, etc.) but keep proviging a minimal power charge to the RAM in your machine so it won't lose its contents.
Since all the content remains in RAM that way, your machine will behave the same as if you did a hibernate, except it doesn't have to spend the additional ~25 seconds writing everything to disk first when you shut down, and also doesn't have to spend that time to read it back into RAM on bootup... Resulting in the ~6 second bootup time.
(While it takes some power for the RAM to keep its information, it is negligible compared to a complete shut down, since any modern PC still provides some power to the motherboard after it is 'powered off'. Case in point: See the LED on the main board indicating the power status on a machine that's supposedly turned off)
It's been a long time since I truly shut down my PC.
Note: the one catch is that if you do lose power to your machine while it is in standby mode, any contents that were in memory at the time will be forgotten again, and it will do a 'full' bootup next time you start. Hibernate doesn't have that problem, but takes significantly longer to shut down and boot up.
Well, first off, the comparison between a TV and a Computer is misleading. TVs for the most part, remain nothing more that big Audio Video amplifiers. If I could post a block diagram, you'd have the receiving section (UHF/VHF etc), the audio and video amplifiers with a little bit of tuning capabilities etc, and the presentation (the screen, audio output etc.) There's not much going on in terms of what the device needs to know to be able to boot.
Fast forward to the newer TVs with a lot of digital "intelligent" boxes in them and you can already start to see bootstrapping time.
Computers (circa80s and so on) have almost always required a lot of time to discover their environment, whether it be the associated hardware to discovering the network they're on.
Nonetheless, the question is a good one. Why not? Part of the reason is that in making devices modular, one incurs a certain need to exchange data to make the device work. The interfaces (e.g., CPU to Video card or CPU to hard disk) continue to remain slow... so at boot up time, there is considerable time taken to repeat these very same actions each time. The second reason has to deal with the operating systems we got out there - Why must they control every aspect of the hardware beneath them? Why couldn't it just be a set of modules where they can send a unified data stream and have the device deal with it. This rant ranges from the IO buffering required for some devices to the management of actual devices for consuming data by the OS. I'm appalled everytime I see how many queues get involved in just sending data in and out of a modern OS.I'll readily grant that this is just an off the cuff reply - many here have given equally good reasons and the topic deserves much more careful study. Just my humble 2 cents.
Cheers!
Boottime is dependent on your hardware and which programs start at bootup. Disable any program that is set to start at bootup that you don't use. Look at the benchmarks of your hard drives. Keep in mind that having a slow hard drive and a fast hard drive on the same ribbon(which is often the case when you have more than one hard drive) it can slow it down. RAM speed and the amount of RAM. If your severily low on RAM often the system will have to do a lot of swapping out of memory to the hard disk. Processor speed determines how fast OS, drivers and software loads. Hibernation is kind of like a dumb bootup. Take everything from RAM and put it on the hard disk. Shut off the computer. Hard drive speed is the key factor for this. When you turn it back on take everything from the harddisk and put it into RAM. Device manufacturers must write their drivers to be able to handle what I like to call the "dumb" boot. A lot of devices can prevent the system from going into hibernation. The trick is to figure out where your bottle neck is. The easiest bottleneck to fix is put more RAM in your computer because many computers ship from the manufacturer without enough RAM in my opinion.
....My bottom-of-the-line Toshiba A65 laptop can do the same thing.....
That is wonderful and I am glad that your computer works as it should. In reading through so many posts in this topic it seems that this is a sore spot for many PC users, whereas it is a non-issue to Mac users. The fact that your system works fine proves that this issue has to do with hardware-software integration. Apparently Toshiba pays better attention to such details than other PC makers.
All theory is gray
My understanding is that thiis partially due to ACPI and BIOS being generally "sucky" and long due for replacement. PowerPCs used Open Firmware, and Intel Macs use EFI -- both of which are far superior to BIOS.
Vista's lack of EFI support is a real sign of MS's misplaced priorities, imho.
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
Hibernation insuffient resources exist to complete the API see MSKB 909095.
Download and install to fix (you don't even have to ring PSS any more!) IMHO, this is an update they really should push out using Automatic Updates. (They probably will when the next security bug is found in the kernel.)
Tube filaments were designed for a warm up time of 11 seconds. Since the resistance of the filaments varied as they heated, it was important, in a series string where the low voltage filaments operated from the 120 line, to keep the filament heating uniform so the voltage dropped across each tube stayed relatively constant as all the tubes got up to operating temperature.
A QD_005
I agree with the parent that there were sets where the filaments stayed on all the time for an "Instant-On" effect. Actually it was an always-on situation, but the B+ and high voltage wasn't applied until the set was "turned on". See http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/F_tvfaqd.html#TVF
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Actually (and if you go up a ways in the thread, somebody links to the Apple TIL explaining it) modern Macs do a "sleep+suspend" at the same time. When they go to sleep, they also write the contents of RAM to a file on the disk. This way if you deplete the battery in standby, or if you remove the battery for some reason, when you power it up next, it does a wake-from-suspend rather than a complete reboot.
I don't have a Mac that's new enough to support it (my aging iBook G3 definitely doesn't) but it seems like a neat compromise feature, particularly when you consider that a Mac in standby is good for more than a week. If you're not going to use it for longer than that, hardly seems worth doing anything besides really shutting it down.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The biggest problem of booting up like this is that the contents of memory and cpu registers isn't enough. The hardware has to be properly initialized as well. Since the internal state of the drivers indicates that has already been done, a consistent mechanism to force re-initialization of all hardware has to be in place after the system reloads the image. That might take as long as a normal boot does.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
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.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
Remember those numbers vary from install to install. They were likely running a fairly new install but not completely so.
Probably 80% of the boot time is crappy drivers and helper apps that seem to accumulate over time.
I put my OS on a Raptor and a clean install boots in roughly 6 seconds. A few months later, it's up around 20 seconds. Give it a year and I have no doubt I'll be sucking up near 60 second boot times as the assorted cruft Windows picks up tries to initialize itself and happily conflicts with everything else.
Much as I love knocking Microsoft as much as the next guy, their pure OS can boot relatively quickly. Adobe's acrobat reader, VersionCue and color management, Microsoft's own office and search helpers, various IM clients, Apple's iPod agent, ATi's Catalyst Control Center, the ever useful ABit uGuru, the Windows Media connect I have for my 360, the UPS monitor, Spyware blocker, Java install and the Windows Update I chose to set to auto-download-but-not-install culmulatively kill me. The sad truth is, I know a clean OS install takes me maybe a quarter of what I currently endure due to my love of additional features.
The interesting question will be whether Microsoft has forced anything useful in to their new found love of signed drivers that actually aids this. A logical system would involve drivers that had to register how critical they really were, along with criteria to change that criticality. Arguably, VersionCue could sit there saying, "OK, load your critical stuff and get to me when you can unless an Adobe program tries to start." The same goes for the iPod agent - until the USB bus anounces the presence of a connected iPod, it can probably let the user run the rest of the boot, open iTunes, check mail, etc. My UPS monitor could function almost as well if it didn't start until a minute or two after boot - so long as I had the option to bump its priority up for fault finding. Same goes for uGuru. ATi's catalyst control center could likely load a few critical features for the desktop and worry about the 3D stuff only when an app required it or I tried opening the full control center. Most of the boot could be far more sensibly prioritized but, sadly, Microsoft likely only has signed drivers so they can promote crap like Zune better whilst hindering competition and, even if they did have it, every hardware manufacturer would likely ignore it in the name of never having users curse their software for taking an extra two seconds on those rare occasions. Oh well. A dream at least.
I guess you're too young to have experienced EISA. That's what you are asking for... changes to the system take explicit configuration processes. There's no plug-and-play at all. Just plugging in a new card without configuration means it's effectively not there -- and in some systems, it wouldn't even power the slot until it was configured.
Nobody liked EISA.
Ah. Obviously this is some new meaning of the words 'plain old text' that I wasn't previously aware of.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I support a large number of HP DL380s across a large GAN; they can take a few minutes to boot and for all services to start up. Many of them are frequently shut down due to extended power outages caused by tropical electrical-storms in the area. Other sites turn off their generator every night, so the server has to be shutdown.
:)
I don't much care about the downtime, but clients are faced with an outage of several minutes every time the server so much as reboots. I'm sure everyone here knows how people get when there's a 5 minute delay before they can start repeatedly (and optimistically) clicking the 'Check Mail' button. I'm sure they'd love the faster boot times
I don't relish the idea of populating a 16GB hibernation file - even on arrays of SAS drives. It might be easy to trivialise this question in a workstation context, but it has its relevance.
Now that's an interesting opinion. And by interesting, I mean stupidly narrow-minded. I know quite a few brilliant mathematicians and physicists who don't give a shit about operating systems, or how software interacts with hardware. By your reasoning, these people are "stupid" because they expect a tool to work as advertised. That sounds pretty dumb to me.
I see people posting saying that hardware detection and initialisation is bound to slow things down, and that is true, but its not the whole story.
Whenever you boot a computer, as opposed to a TV set, there are an awful lot of processes going on. Services start up, various configurations and libraries are loaded up. Lots happens and this lots happening contends for one another for the limited resource of I/O, memory and CPU.
Antivirus scans start happening; if you have AV software which scans DLLs or executables on load this will increase the resource contention significantly.
And at every boot things may be slightly different. For one thing, between last reboot and this a virus could have found its way into the system.
Computers are not exactly finite state machines. Every boot will inevitably differ from the last for oh so many reasons.
Its not like a TV where it only has so many states that it could be in at any time and where things don't change between startups.
If you want instant boots, I suggest sticking with a console and playing games and for math use a calculator.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Only if everyone in the world sits around and waits for it to happen every single time, and does absolutely nothing else with that down time. It doesn't count if you spend that time even THINKING about another issue/problem. You have to sit there motionless, stare at the screen, and do absolutely nothing but age.
Personally, I can find plenty of things to do with my time when I know I can walk away.
The more significant issue, IMHO, is the responsiveness of programs. Forget boot-up times, when you don't even have to be there. How about the delay between clicking the Firefox icon, and waiting for it to start-up so you can do useful work? How about the delay between clicking on a link, and having that link load and render? How about the ammount of time the system is unresponsive as it does something (like render a webpage) in the background?
That, IMHO, is many times more important, and something I certainly have to deal with far more often than reboots. Personally, I have a 2GHz system, with 1GB of RAM, and I still strictly stick with GTK-1 programs, because it's so much faster and more responsive than GTK-2 (or QT) equivalents (as well as not uselessly wasting screen realestate). Ever program I use has a fully functional GTK-1 equivalent, so I'm not missing out on anything by sticking with it, it's just an occasional hassle to change the default configure option, or using a different program because the new version of whatever dropped GTK-1 support (like switching from GAIM to Ayttm). It's a rare issue, and well worth the improved performance anyhow.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
No, that's (almost entirely) baseless nonsense.
Computer hardware has a much easier time handling repeated power cycles, than it does dissipating the heat, and wear and tear on motors, bering, etc., created from idling for an hour. You shouldn't reboot every couple minutes, but even 15 minutes should be a net gain.
In addition, the power savings will very quickly add-up, so you can buy another computer every year from your savings on the electric bill.
Think of incandesent lightbulbs. Sure, they (generally) only burn-out when first switched-on, yet I don't see many people leaving their lights on 24 hours/day, just covering them when you want it to be dark.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
You youngsters, with your fancy 5 minute boot process. My abacus is always on and ready for computation. I bet your energy-saving mode doesn't use 0 watts.
... and then they built the supercollider.
...it depends on how you have built up your embedded system - if it uses slowly accessible flash (chances are high - because cost is low) 2 seconds is pretty much unreachable. The best you can get is probably 10-15 seconds, but without special (hardware/software) changes your kernel will definitely not boot in 2 seconds.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Flash is as fast as you want to pay for. Do you think those solid state hard drives that use fiber channel and sell for $15,000 read at 7MB/s? Heck no.
The SanDisk Ultra IV cards are another example. They do about 40 MB/s. It's basically a RAID stripe across the internal flash chips.
The problem is old-school linear thinking we've inherited.
There is no technical reason that a computer could not wake up, verify the keyboard, memory, hd, mouse and display are the same (in a few microseconds, probably) and be up and responding very well to the user, while (new concept, brace yourselves) the computer carefully brings up other hardware subsystems and makes them available as they become functional. You could be in a word processor, graphics editor, all manner of things that don't require more hardware until you do something like print or attempt to access the network; if those subsystems are not ready when you try to use them, the design would allow for [establishing hardware, wait or cancel] and there you have it.
There is no problem whatsoever with plug and play concepts coexisting with fast usability other than current design shortcomings end users have been forced to live with. The computer is running as soon as the HD is spinning, memory sized, and the video card is on and the KB and mouse work. Just because current operating systems don't let you begin working at that time isn't a reflection on plug and play as a concept, it's a reflection of linear thinking that descends from old single tasking systems like early DOS.
The idea that a 2...3 GHz 32 or 64 bit CPU cannot bring itself to decent usability in under a second is one that is silly right on the face of it except in that common systems are using old school thinking and layering more and more crap on top of that thinking. There is not a thing in the world that says drivers can't be loaded on demand, or after usability from boot, or separately. Nothing.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16822116156
Or maybe you are.
--S (not that you'll find SAS in laptops, but hey, this is slashdot.)
-- sigs cause cancer.
>The other issue I have is that I normally use a VPN to connect to work, and the VPN tunnel doesn't like getting shut down and restarted, especially with a different IP address, so I still have to re-authenticate by typing in my security token code to the VPN client.
Isn't that what's supposed to happen? You've left your computer for a while, especially a portable one, it better disconnect any secure resources it has. It's comfort over security as usual, but I think this is by design.
Having worked on many CRT displays I just wanted to point out that the CRT is definitly not kept on any kind of warm stand-by, none that I have ever seen any way.
I'm not very familiar with CRT technology, but I've always wondered why CRT power specifications so often have quite high values for 'standby power'. I know a monitor will return to displaying an image from standby faster than it will from power off, but I'm not really sure how the two start processes are different.
I don't suppose you can enlighten me?
Thanks!
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
It should not take that long for your desktop to work. Download the Startup Control Panel applet and disable everything that's attempting to boot. This tool is really nice as it has a tab for every way for a program to autostart itself.
I use then when writing auto-install scripts. For each app that tries to autostart (which is absolutley unnacceptable for any application to do) I find out how that particular one does it and disable it after the install/upgrade.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
No, I think it needs to be amended to: "the software designers are arrogant and haven't bothered communicating with their public".
Anybody who makes global statements like that, well you got to check out where they are coming from. On slashdot this line regularly appears, "I am an expert with N number of years experience, (X) is obvious, (X) is easy, anybody who doesn't think so is stupid, come back when you have 10, 20 years experience before daring to complain".
That's designed for small form factor servers.
2.5 inch form factor does not automatically mean "laptop drive".
Please show me a laptop that uses SAS instead of SATA or PATA.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Now that's an interesting opinion. And by interesting, I mean stupidly narrow-minded. I know quite a few brilliant mathematicians and physicists who don't give a shit about operating systems, or how software interacts with hardware. By your reasoning, these people are "stupid" because they expect a tool to work as advertised. That sounds pretty dumb to me. I give you five points for your well-crafted troll. Bravo.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Microsoft has a free utility called bootvis that visually shows you were your computer bootup is spending it's time. You can download this utility at: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/System-Tweak/Bo otVis.shtml
This utility also has some whitepapers with advice on what you can do to speed up your boot times.
I know quite a few brilliant mathematicians and physicists who don't give a shit about operating systems
Yeah, I know really. I know a lot of astronauts and presidents myself, and ninjas. I haven't been able to get them to care either.
As for Adobe, they just don't like you.
"Her idea of wit is nothing more than an incisive observation humorously phrased and delivered with impeccable timing."
Ah, the yonder days of yore, when you could boot up a TI-99/4A or a Commodore 64 in a mere 2-3 seconds.
Sure, you only had 64 K of total RAM (16 K with the TI; unless you had a PE).
Sure, the Commodore 1541 floppy drive was only slightly faster than handwriting machine code and typing it into the machine.
Sure, the OS wasn't upgradable (by any software means).
Sure, my cell phone's processor could run circles around their CPUs.
But you gotta admit, they booted FAST!
There are two areas you need to look at on this issue, and to not look at each, you miss possible solutions.
The first area is the BIOS boot time, which has nothing to do with how long it takes Windows to load. On many systems, it takes a while for the BIOS to check for hardware, hard drives, and even devices that may or may not be there before booting. Now, this is an area that many can improve, but in some cases, the BIOS itself will never allow you to tweak things properly.
In the "old days", you had the option to set the drive parameters yourself in the BIOS, and to avoid having the BIOS scan for devices. Or you could do a one-time scan, and it would put in the parameters for you so the system doesn't need to check them every time you boot. I honestly miss that since on most systems today, you need to wait for the system to check what type of hard drives and CD drives you have every time you boot the machine.
Next, you have support for all sorts of devices that many people never use. If you disable the integrated firewire controller(IEEE 1394) for example, there should improve performance. You should be able to disable the integrated audio if you have a sound card as well. Or the floppy controller. There is a LOT of this junk that gets checked every time you boot the system. The sad thing is that it seems the BIOS STILL checks all this unused stuff at boot time. It may be a little faster, but the BIOS still knows the features are there, and it bloats the process. More features are generally not better when it comes to the time it takes the BIOS to finish checking.
So, the BIOS finally lets you boot.
And now, Windows starts to check every last feature in your system so it can set it as a device for Plug and Play. Even if you disable the feature in the BIOS, Windows will find it, and try to get a driver working for it. You may be able to avoid this by using jumpers on the motherboard to disable features rather than the BIOS/CMOS setup, but not always.
Microsoft ships Windows XP and Vista with all sorts of features enabled by default, which increases the load time. You have to love how Microsoft auto-enabled Wireless Zero configuration for every copy of Windows XP, even if you are looking at a desktop system without a wireless card in it. Windows Time, and many other services get turned on by default, and that is where most of the problem comes from as well. If you have Norton Anti-Virus, that will add to it, and Internet Security is worse still.
Now, it's not always the fault of Microsoft, Dell is one of the worst offenders when it comes to "adding features". When you get a Dell, unless you specifically ask them not to pre-load all their garbage, you get Dell support agents, and software to "make it easier for them to help you". What it really does is make them money because they get to sell more hardware when angry customers want to throw their monitor across the room because of stupid garbage like this.
The speed of the hard drive is another thing to look at when it comes to how long it takes to boot. If you have a 4200RPM hard drive, that's slow by the standards of today, but most systems come with either a 4200RPM or 5400RPM hard drive in them, rather than the faster 7200RPM or 10,000RPM drives. You can have two identical machines except for the hard drive, and you will find that a faster hard drive can trim 25 percent off the time it takes to boot.
System memory is the final area that can slow down your boot speed. If you have under 512 megs of system memory, that's too little for Windows XP, and generally you want 1 gig or more of system memory to make Windows XP load and run well. With Vista, this jumps to 1 gig really being required to load/run decently, with 2 gigs for what you really want.
If you have multiple physical hard drives, because of all the above issues, it really does pay to consolidate down to a single drive. I have recently done such a consolidation, going from 4 physical hard drives down to a single drive, and it has done wonders.
AmigaOS 3.1 boots in 5 seconds. Just another reason why Workbench 3.1 is better than Windows XP and Linux
My homepage: www.erkan.se
A lot of people set up applications (IM, screen eye-candy, etc.) to start during boot-up and that can lead to excessive delays in starting the computer. Also, if you know what you're doing you can fine-tune the services that automatically start when Windows boots up. Be warned that if you *don't* know what you're doing that you can brick your system pretty quickly. Other ways to speed up your boot times (especially if you've been running the same install for a longish period of time) is to reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows. You'll be horrified at the amount of clutter that accumulates over time to slow things down (caveat: back up all data and have all of your application installation software handy as well as a day of movies/etc. while you are reinstalling).
My assumption is that you want to stay with Windows and not explore other operating systems (as has been suggested by other respondents), so I won't go down the path of suggesting the same.
Of course, your mileage may vary....
Whenever someone says "why can't computers be more like $APPLIANCE", the correct answer is almost always "because computers are much more complicated than $APPLIANCE".
Forget how complicated your computer's hardware is (and I have no doubt that you've read the blurbs about how the latest Intel chip has 80 zillion transisters) and just think about the software. If you go through your computer and you find all the files whose names end with DLL, EXE, DRV or SYS, total up their size and divide that number by 8, that is (very, very roughly) the number of individual parts that makes up the workings of your computer's software layer.
All other human endeavor pales in comparison to that. You shouldn't be complaining that your computer is buggy or slow or bloated or that it takes too long to boot. You should be amazed that it works at all.
(And yes, people are working on making computers start up faster. Someday, someone will do it and it will be another huge, complicated effort that everyone will just sort of take for granted, just like they have every other technological miracle.)
Turn off file sharing and make sure that your TCP settings do not do NetBIOS over IP. When an XP machine is booting with file sharing is on it sits there waiting for domain controllers or workgroups (master browser searching) to join. Capture the boot up process with a sniffer for some interesting insights into what the machine is attempting to do. AV software is also a huge cycle killer. Most is set to scan all of the OS files as they load ... with this is pretty much a must have but you would be surprised how much faster it loads with no AV scanning taking place during the startup process.