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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."
Splashtop sounds good, but TFA portrays it as requiring the user to pick between OSes at boot. That sucks if the user wants a fast boot and eventual access to all their "real" applications. Instead, I see more need for a light weight interim OS (a preOS??) that boots and lets the user do a few things while the main OS continues to boot in the background. Something like Splashtop could boot first, launch a couple of key "first-thing" apps (e.g. web with some morning news or email) and then transfer the session data to the main OS once it's up and running. After a minute (or whatever) Splashtop would crossfade to the main OS and decommission itself.
Of course, the real solution is stable instant-on low power modes (and OSes) that make the morning boot wholly obsolete.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Since I turned off automatic Windows updates I rarely worry about shutting down and rebooting.
I hope it has really good power management, because otherwise that's an extreme waste of energy.
It's funny how many slashdotters are posting to say that Windows sucks and boots slow, and of course the solution is to run Linux. 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 don't know the solution to the problem, either, because it sounds like the problem is basically that manufacturers refuse to openly document the registers that need to be saved when their devices go to sleep. If I had working power management, then I wouldn't need to shut down my computer so often, and I wouldn't care much what my boot times were. This is all much bigger issue on laptops, of course.
I believe one of the reasons Linux doesn't boot faster than it does is that there's a kernel feature that, for security, randomizes the addresses at which various code is loaded into memory each time you boot. This is supposed to protect against buffer overflows that jump to a fixed address in memory. The problem is that it means you can't speed up booting by simply caching an image of the initialized state of a lot of your memory in a freshly booted system.
I don't know about other people's Linux boxes, but on mine the time taken to start Gnome is comparable to the time it takes to boot into gdm. That's one of the reasons I run fluxbox rather then Gnome.
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I really wish vendors made better use of scheduled tasks for update checking. Java, for instance, installs an at-logon time update checker. There's no reason that they couldn't schedule a task every 3 hours to do the following:
1. Star the updater app.
2. Check lastupdatetime.dat.
3. Has it been more than a week since I checked for updates?
4. Yes it has - check now.
The updater stub can be very lean -- a few dozen KB at most, and launch a heavier-duty updater as needed.
Everyone wins - the system stays up to date and the user doesn't get bogged down with retarded logon applications. Best of all, the user can change update checks - or disable them entirely - from one central scheduled tasks panel.