Startup Offers Instant-Boot Windows Alternative

Lucas123 writes "A Silicon Valley startup named Device VM has a product that circumvents the boot-up process, according to a story in MIT's Technology Review. Device VM recently released a tiny piece of software that gives users the option to boot either Windows or a faster, less-complex operating system called Splashtop. The company is partnering with PC OEMs and consumer electronics companies to integrate its core technology into desktops, notebooks, ultra-mobile PCs, and other devices."

Comments

Hey, anybody knows

[microbee]

How to get slashdot coverage if I have a startup?

Taking all bets here!

[Pojut]

Taking all bets here, folks! How long before Microsoft tries to do something to try to get PC companies to not have this in their systems? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

and then what?

[gambit3]

Umm... ok, so I booted instantly into this thing... now what?

Don't get me wrong, the long boot times of XP annoy me (except when it's freshly installed), but I don't see how this helps, unless it provides for an instant boot INTO XP, I don't see how you'd get regular people interested or how it will help them.

Re:and then what?

[merreborn]

I don't see how you'd get regular people interested or how it will help them.

If your PC is off, and you want to check movie times on your way out the door, being able to rapidly boot into an environment with a web browser would be appealing.

For the type of user that leaves their PC off most of the time, the ability to accomplish a single task rapidly could be appealing.

Re:and then what?

[misleb]

If your PC is off, and you want to check movie times on your way out the door, being able to rapidly boot into an environment with a web browser would be appealing.

Try using a (web enabled) phone and you can literally do it on your way out the door. Making a PC instantly available is an increasingly disminishing benefit.

For the type of user that leaves their PC off most of the time, the ability to accomplish a single task rapidly could be appealing.

Or they could just try hibernating their existing OS and get the same effect. Seriously, marketing a new OS based on boot time is just stupid.

-matthew

Re:and then what?

[peragrin]

how about using an OS that has decent hibernate and sleep functions? I know MSFT keeps breaking them so windows users rarely know that joy, but damn. I know Linux can do it, Windows can too.

My two Macs take 10 seconds to load up and are network ready and 5 seconds of that is me typing in my password. REboots should only be used when you need to update the system. If you have so many memory problems that you need to reboot more often than that , then i suggest you upgrade your OS to something that isn't a fisherprice toy.

I can pull out my laptop raise the cover log in, check movie times, and put it back faster than a fresh XP install or hell even a fresh OS X install can boot.

All MSFT has to do is stop screwing around with the ACPI specs and not care if Linux or anyone else can use them. that won't happen so windows users will always get shafted.

Misnomer

[kebes]

Calling this "Instant-Boot" is a bit of a stretch. What they are describing is just a dual-boot bootloader that gives the option of booting into Windows or into Linux (Splashtop is a trimmed-down Linux distribution). The 20 second boot time for Splashtop is decently fast, but hardly "instant", especially when you compare it to how fast some computers can recover from sleep or hibernate modes.

It seems moderately interesting, in the sense that some users might suddenly realize that all their computing needs are met by a lightweight (and Free) operating system. They might rarely boot into Windows. On the other hand, for many people this "fast boot" will just make using the computer more frustrating, since they will boot into Splashtop to get something done quickly, but then suddenly realize that they need another application (that they only have on their Windows partition), and then have to endure another, longer, boot (and re-open whatever webpage they were just looking at, etc.).

In short, the interesting thing here is the idea of pushing a dual-boot computer to the masses, and not an "instant on" computer.

Re:All I need do is replace my whole OS

[Dmala]

It's kind of silly, people moan about their bootup time, meanwhile they have 800,000 apps that all launch at boot and run in the system tray. I've never understood why it's so important to have instantaneous access to Quicktime movies, Word docs, or PDF files that it's worth having something running and sucking up resources all the time. Even OpenOffice is guilty, although their app is easier to get rid of than most. Turn off all that shit except for stuff you genuinely need, make sure you have adequate RAM for the OS you're running, and Windows boots plenty fast.

Brilliant!

[Foddz]

Excellent! Now I have something to boot to and surf microsoft's tech support site with when my Vista install inevitably goes bad!

Re:All I need do is replace my whole OS

[msimm]

Maybe you haven't stepped outside the university much, but most users have those apps boot at start-up because they don't know how to disable them (or worry they'll break something if they did).

Couple that with the persistence of certain vendors installing unnecessary applications into their taskbars (and as services) and of course there's a lot of cruft that could be cleaned up.

Re:My desktop machine has been up 700hrs

[ErroneousBee]

I run Linux, but one of the things I'm least happy about is the horrible support for power management. None of the sleep, hibernate, etc., options work on my machine at all.

I once had a problem with this, and decided to investigate.

So I went through the forums and found that the problem was that the manufacturer of the laptop supplies a dsdt table that does not follow the published standards for dsdt tables.

So I found a corrected table for my laptop and suspend/resume now works. But I was interested as to why a manufacturer would supply a DSDT that didnt follow the specs. And heres what I found:

1. The ACPI standard is rather complicated, almost as if it was disigned to be hard to implement. Checking to find who the major players in defining the specification, I find my fist clue: "Conceived by Intel, Microsoft and Toshiba"
2. So why would they create such a complicated specification? My next clue was that Microsoft was the developer of one of two major 3DSDT compilers.
3. It appears that the DSDT compiler Microsoft created is very forgiving of errors that other compilers (such as from Intel) would flag.
4. I don't believe it is coincidence that the parts of the ACPI specification parsed strictly by the Microsoft compiler are those needed by Microsoft operating systems.

So Microsoft create a complicated specification, probably taking care to leave out important implementation details. Then they ship a compiler for the specification that only checks parts of the specification used by their own software. And thats why Linux has issues with suspend/resume on some hardware.

Does any of this sound familiar?