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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?"
It is because until now, you haven't submitted your question to Slashdot.
"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
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.
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.
(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
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!
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
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.
That can happen when you have more than 1GB of RAM. That happened when I upgraded to 2GB of RAM in my system. I did a quick Google search, and found that there is actually a Microsoft released hotfix for the problem.
I need a sig.
I mean, all those gears and counterweights can't be that slow, now can they? Wait...
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 dont think that hibernation answers the question that the poster was asking. Hibernation is a great way to resume a session. But how about resuming from a "just booted, nothing loaded" scenario? For some reason, and maybe it is because Microsoft is revising the definition of "booting", people seem to equate resuming from hibernation or sleep or deep sleep modes booting. It is not. It is resuming from... It is amazing though, that MS now is bragging about how fast Vista "boots" when all it is really doing is resuming from some sort of sleep, suspend or hibernation mode. The poster brings up a good point. Actual booting could be sped up by having a booted image saved - similar to a hibernation file, that the machine uses to boot from instead of actually going through the boot process of loading everything.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
I just spent 30 seconds reading your post.
YOU BASTARD!
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.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
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.
Of course, it should be noted that there IS a way to have Windows leave the hibernation file alone unless you tell it to hibernate again; that is, a hibernate once, resume many kind of situation. It's a trick often used when building a car PC. You get the system to the point where you'd want the system to start from, then tell it to hibernate. From then on, it'll resume from that spot. If you can get your system to work properly with hibernation, it's just about as fast as you'll ever get it to boot.
My sig can beat up your sig.
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.
Depends on what mainboard you have.. Love my new Asus mainbord with that so called "ams live" feature. Takes about 3-4 seconds for the POST on a coldboot.
And if you really want to speed up the bootprocess on some system have a look at the linuxbios project, if you mainboard is supported that is.
And some hints on how to speed up the bios "boot":
- Hard-configure the HD's you have in your system and deactivate any unused master/slave positions.
- If running PATA make shure master/slave is connected to the correct position on the cable and use the jumper to set it to master or slave instead of autodetect.
- Activate fast-boot
- Disable anything you dont use on the mainboard, if running linux check if you can disable IDE controllers you dont use for booting, some might still be usable after booting the OS.
- Activate fast-boot, on a warm-boot there are alot of tests that can be skipped.
- If you have any bootable cards in the system disable their boot-bios so they dont have to be scanned during the POST.
Just a few hints.
...or you can just go into Quicktime's config and disable the startup option. You don't get that same feeling of beating The Man, though.