Microsoft Considers "Instant On" Windows

Barence writes "In what might be a glimpse of things to come in Windows 7, Microsoft is asking customers whether they would be interested in a new 'Instant-on' version of Windows. 'We would like your feedback on a new concept,' the Microsoft survey states. 'The Instant On experience is different from "Full Windows" because it limits what activities you can do and what applications you can have access to.' Sounds interesting but hardly new: Asus and Dell have produced laptops that provide swift access to apps and data using Linux subsystems."

Comments

Re:Uptime...

[Jake73]

System Up Time: 0 Days, 21 Hours, 32 Minutes, 58 Seconds

Why does anybody turn their notebooks off?

Windows Update :( Not "off" but restart.

Hm. I run both Windows and Mac. I can't remember the last time I did any update to a Mac that didn't require a restart. It's really pretty annoying.

Windows has gotten much better about not requiring restarts for updates. A huge change from its Windows 95/98 and NT days.

Re:Easy Lazy Instant-On/Off...

[DavidTC]

Of course, if Windows hibernation operated anything like Linux hibernation, it would work a lot better.

For reference, Linux hibernation doesn't bother writing non-writable memory pages to the hibernation file. So the hibernation file is much smaller compared to Windows. (Which is why Linux can hibernate to a swap file.)

But this is because Linux can 'swap' from the original executable file into memory. So when it unhibernates, it 'unswaps' most of the programs from their original location, only loading the data segments from the swap file.

Of course, a good portion of the program is already in swap, so what actually happens is that all data segments not in the swap file are written to it, with as much executable segments overwritten as needed to fit those in. It is very very fast.

As opposed to Windows, which sits down and writes out all of physical memory to another file, and then has to load it all back in.(It might even write out 'clean' memory pages that are already in the swap file and unchanged since they were loaded back in memory, but I bet MS is smarter than that.)

Granted, Linux still has to, eventually, load all the programs into memory too, but it can load them in via 'swap', which is fairly invisible to the end user.