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PC Makers Try To Pinch Seconds From Their Boot Times
Some computers are never turned off, or at least rarely see any state less active than "standby," but others (for power savings or other reasons) need rebooting — daily, or even more often. The New York Times is running a short article which says that it's not just a few makers like Asus who are trying to take away some of the pain of waiting for computers, especially laptops, to boot up. While it's always been a minor annoyance to wait while a computer slowly grinds itself to readiness, "the agitation seems more intense than in the pre-Internet days," and manufacturers are actively trying to cut that wait down to a more bearable length. How bearable? A "very good system is one that boots in under 15 seconds," according to a Microsoft blog cited, and an HP source names an 18-month goal of 20-30 seconds.
I cut down on my startup time by buying a new harddrive that didn't come without all the preloaded drivers and crap and reinstalling the OS. My dell now loads in approximately 45 seconds. Which admittedly is a little more than the "optimal" 20 second time, but it much better than the 3 minutes I had to wait before.
Why this is still an issue in this day and age.
For example, my Mac will go from startup to login in half the time of either Vista -or- Ubuntu (not counting what happens -after- login, but as far as applications go, they're fairly straightforward), but my TV will start in a second or two. So did my old Commodore 64.
How is it that the more power we get, the -longer- this takes? And why is it that the solution always involves hardware makers? Maybe we need to look at how our operating systems are constructed instead of blaming the hardware itself.
If firefighters fight fire, and crimefighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight? - George Carlin
Even Microsoft, whose bloated Windows software is often blamed for sluggish start times, has pledged to do its part in the next version of the operating system, saying on a company blog that "a very good system is one that boots in under 15 seconds."
I'll believe it when I see it.
There's nothing MS, Asus or anyone else can do to stop individuals (or computer mfgs) from loading up their computers with hard-drive-thrashing amounts of startup software.
Vista is particularly to blame with their nifty transparent desktop widgets that stretch the time it takes computers to go from off to useable.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
... when they are ready will do a lot to alleviate the boot wait times. Although I'm sure a lot of wait time has to do with the programming of the bios/hardware initialization, not to mention programs optimized for the latency of hard drives. I noticed in previous versions of windows (and I'm certain even xp/vista still) when certain drivers load they can cause delays.
I've always wondered with the cheapness of ram, how hard/costly could it be after the first boot, and then simply have insta-boot thereafter. So it boots right out of the ram using standby + /w battery backup on the ram. You can get 2 gigs for less then $50, how much would be 256/512MBit chip soldered onto mass produced mobo be I wonder?
> "...makers like Asus who are trying to take some of the pain of waiting computers, especially laptops, to boot up.
:)
Take my iBook, for example. I just sleep it, and when I open the lid and hit a key, it wakes up. It can go days before it needs to be recharged. I put it to sleep and bag-stash it before going thru airport security, and if they want to see it work, I just wake it up...bam...done.
I think more work should be done towards improving sleep-state longevity and run-time rather than towards rapid booting, but hey, that's just me
I'd like to see boot-to-usable-browser time to be improved. This includes avoiding disk trashing/excessive seeking during startup due to launching all kinds of services / programs that are not necessary right now.
It would be nice to be able to:
- allow choosing what applications/service can started up once the computer is idle / less busy
- automatically sense which parts of the hard drive are accessed on startup (before / after loging), have them placed in contiguous regions on the hard drive and read them in memory in the quickest way possible.
I know, flash-based memory doesn't have problems with seek times like hard drives, but still memory caching would be useful.
It reminds me of the old 8086/80286 days with DOS without smartdisk on(disk caching).. Now we need the next step - don't trash the disk during startup. Why do we have 3GB+ memory when we under utilize it during startup?
There needs to be an industry wide effort to prevent startup bloatware. Why does windows let AIM install itself as a startup program without having the damn UAC complain that this is a protected area? Why does every HP come with 30 preinstalled programs in the startup? Startup items need to be protected in some way: Seriously, I love it if I installed a program and windows said, "Are you sure you want this program to start automatically with windows?" We should just kill the hardware comapnies for the bloatware they install for kickbacks.
My later Amigas typically had a boot time of 10 seconds. Full blown AmigaOS on an internal HD on the A3000. I miss them dearly.
We've managed to stav off the usefulness of moore's law by creating the world's worst software to run on them.
It's not fair to judge modern systems with those older ones however; we ask a lot more of our software and our GUI's than we once did. But there is no excuse in the way that windows configures itself by default, it sets itself up for failure by having a re-sizable swap partition on the main OS partition.
When I install Windows on a new PC, I always create 3 partitions: An inner partition of 5 - 10 GB for a fixed size swap file only, then an OS partition, then an applications partition, and defrag regularly. I can keep my machines going for many years without much performance degradation in this manner.
Even if you are scrupulous, bad software and bad uninstall jobs will eventually bloat out your system a little bit.
A little common sense goes a long way, unfortunately those who do not deal with computers for a living aren't going to know these little tips and tricks, and will continue to be frustrated. OS manufacturers, in particular windows need to set up a default OS install for success, not failure. Software manufacturers need to create very clean installs and uninstall routines. Unfortunately this is not always possible in the OS environment. It's a joint effort.
The tin-foil hatters will think that M$ is doing this on purpose so people will feel compelled to upgrade more frequently, but I don't really give them that much conniving intelligence.
--Mike
Wait, what MS system current boots under 15 seconds?
... I need to pinch off a copy of Vista
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
Windows seems to boot pretty fast, but it's at least another minute before the system is actually usable. That's at home - at work, it's easily 3-5 minutes. It's rediculous. Even if these manufacturers manage to shave off a few seconds in the best case scenario it probably won't mean much when you start to look at real-life situations.
Standy on desktop doesn't waste that much electricity (10-15Watt) compared to a power off mode (5Watt). With the newer power supplys, for the past 10 or so years, a powered off computer still consumes power as it needs to keep that power on/off button hot (12v or 5v, not sure). The older power supplies, the power button was a true 110/220V switch. To achieve that now, you have to use the switch in the back where the power supply is..
"Vista is particularly to blame with their nifty transparent desktop widgets that stretch the time it takes computers to go from off to useable."
And how many users are to blame for not turning Aero off?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
It's not like the user will be doing anything for the first minute after the computer starts anyway. It's merely the act of waiting and not being able to interact while it boots. Once it boots up people will still *do nothing* of importance on it.
It's psychological - the user wants to see progress. Even if it boots up and shows the desktop quickly, the user will have to wait until all the startup programs finish loading. If they can double-click on IE (oops, Firefox, since we're on Slashdot) sooner they will be happy, even if the system is only semi-responsive.
The real problem is mechanical components and violatile ram. In the days of magnetic core a computer could recover from power failure and resume running in few seconds. Disks did take a will to spin up.
When I was young, I had to rub sticks together to compute.
less seconds at boot time?
then why don't they use coreboot(ex linuxbios)?
my hp spends at least 5 seconds before grub shows up. coreboot claims 3 second to linux console.
the remaining boot time is os-dependent. my slack takes much more time than ubuntu on identical computers, but that's because of the distro, not something else (ssd excluded)...
"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know." -- Mark Twain
I mean, with hibernation and standby modes, outside the need to restart for some sort of update--why even shutdown?
It just all seems pointless to me. I don't find ANY OS's boot times slow enough to start tinkering with ways to make it faster. Even Vista on this laptop was well under a minute. And that's to "usable". XP and Linux are maybe a few seconds faster. Is there really some use for it booting in 20 seconds vs. maybe 30?
I just bought a new PC, and was absolutely dismayed when I activated the AHCI (SATA) firmware to discover it added about ten full seconds to the boot time. I have no idea what it performs during that time (some kind of calibration? I sure hope it's not a stupid just-to-be-safe timeout).
Conversely, I have desactivated IDE support, and it has now become very hard to enter the BIOS since the initial screen goes by so fast. I get about a quarter of a second to press the right key.
The usability of the BIOS is exactly the same as it was ten years ago. It's a shame no progress has occurred in that area in such a long time. I want it to go as fast as possible when everything is settled, but I also want to be able to pause and look at everything step by step while I am installing hardware. Apparently no one cares about that. :(
Please forgive me for typos and incoherent speech, for I am drunk. Now on to power saving modes. I did notice that both at home (with my seven computers) and at my work place that the red herring effect caused by powering computers on and off during business hours is pretty much the same as leaving them on with standby mode etc. To be honest a 15 second boot time is rediculous. I mean my XP laptop boots in about 5-8 seconds...my linux box boots in ~6 seconds. Perhaps my geeky startup enhancments are to blame but I dont recall waiting 20-30 seconds for a computer boot in the last four years...I think the metrics are including windows start times as well? A bit ambiguous to say the least.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
Yup, it has always irritated me that the faster my system gets the more I need to wait for it..
There are IMHO 3 levels to this:
1) BIOS boot. Why the hell do I need to wait for this? I don't need the advertising, thanks, and a state check is BS if it worked before - flag and repeat. The maximum allowed delay should be to show a 2 sec message "Press F1 to enter BIOS or re-scan" - and even that one should be able to switch off. I recall reading something about an Open Source BIOS having to be slowed down because it was ready before the disks had spun up - yes please!
2) OS boot. The actual core OS is again something that, once stable, changes very little. Or so goes the theory, with the incredible amount of patching going on in Windows there is indeed a need for re-scan. But that again is something you do once, then skip the proooooooooooooooooobing for something that *may* be there but doesn't respond in teh half century timeout that it has been given. I can recall something called TurboDOS for the Apple ][ that was a good 3x faster, mainly because someone had brought the timeouts back to something sane.. What I find particularly offensive is the Microsoft marketing department forcing a visible desktop that makes it appear the machine is ready, where any enterprise build will take more than it takes to get a coffee before it is finally really is, even after defragging the disk. That's at least something I find less of an issue with Linux. However, these days there is an awful lot of crap that has to be loaded for no apparent reason - maybe time to lift the covers and go back to basics?
On the Linux front an observation aside: once upon a time, Linux booted in seconds even when the then Worries for Workgroups was already starting to get obese. This speed advantage no longer exists other than that a ready desktop really IS ready :-(
3) App level boot. Once the OS is live, all these other gadgets become alive. There is a whole raft of things that sit and watch for events these days, and most of it does so surreptitiously. Picasa shows a logo and tells you it's watching for events, but the iTunes crap hides, ditto for the Apple update. Once upon a time you could look in Windows "startup" and look at what actually loaded, but that was obviously too visible and useful and could -oh shudder- allow the customer to kill off the things they didn't want. These days, only Logitech and OpenOffice do it as intended, the rest all sits under the radar - motives?
ANY program setting up some form of monitoring should be visible, and offer the advanced user a way to kill it off. I want iTunes only to play music, and I will start it up myself hen I need it to sync - that is a choice I should be able to make. Sure, make it idiot proof but for God's sake leave an option for the non-idiots to control it (and bloody stop trying to shove Safai down my throat with every down, sorry, 'up'grade). And I don't recall ever giving permission for the Apple Update program so where did that come from? I think that is in principle a breach of computing laws to install software without authorisation..
There are so many apps that start up a background process for updates that it's a miracle there's bandwidth left for getting any work done, and starting an app starts off some more. Apple iTunes, Firefox -and each extension thereof-, Thunderbird -ditto-) - the moment you start them the hunt for updates begins. "Stable" has been replaced by "perpertual beta" - and we know who started that (yes Redmond, it's you). I can recall where especially an OS patch was A Big Deal. The fact that someone does this monthly (and now doesn't) should not blind you to the fact that it once was an exceptional event rather than rule.
And then there is the way network events are treated: synchronous. Start Outlook and watch the system die while it waits for some sign of life from the server (and then continues this throughout the day). Watch a DNS lookup freeze a system because the netwo
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What I have noticed is that what is one of the major culprits in long boot times is antivirus software starting up and doing its integrity checks. Reduce this, and you will reduce times perhaps by five minutes on some machines. However, with Windows, I doubt AV makers could do it without reducing security though.
yeah, well, on the mornings I wake up late, I try to pinch seconds when I pinch a loaf
It will even do so on a 1.4GHz system if you use Dosbox's dynarec core, which is fairly impressive. I can't imagine how fast it would be natively on a modern system (it was fast even on a 486/100).
The memory check is still useful, and should be available as an option in the bios. The rest of the POST should be scrapped. No OS uses any of the crap a 25 year old piece of software tries (and fails) to deliver. Yes the hard disk has more of everything than it can detect. Yes there are more ports than it can count. Every modern OS overwrites the 64k of low memory with itself (but X86 processors must first start in 8086 mode, load itself (long jump) into higher but unreadable memory, then switch modes to emm386 mode and then recoup the lower 640k. I know it all sounds old fashioned, but the latest version of Linux has to do it with intel processors, and since microsoft xp/vista run on the same architecture, they have to as well (or lose all that memory). Its not the OS, its the architecture, and the bios. Changing the old bios with something new would help boot times a lot!
Excuse the rant, I've just "upgraded" to gnome 2.24, where 6 months of development has ment replacing working C with slow-ass buggy python crap.
Exactly what C code was replaced with Python? In fact, it's the other way around that's proven to be the most troublesome; Python programs are too slow, thusly everyone's rewriting them as C programs, which of course are more buggy (mostly because 6 months is a very quick cycle and applications written in C, even by experts, can take a while to stablize).
Software is behind hardware. But as we add more capabilities in hardware, we ask the software to do more. If people cared about boot time in the general, it would be fast, in the general. As we've already seen, you can make Linux boot extremely fast with just a tiny bit of work. Only, people don't want it to boot extremely fast. People want it to just work, which means they don't want to wait for a bluetooth daemon to start up when they turn on their bluetooth mouse. They don't want to wait for CUPS to start when they hit print. They don't want to wait for NetworkManager to come up after they've started Firefox for their morning news fix.
We optimized our software for the catch-all case, and it turns out, that's incredibly bad for boot times (and it's not great for battery life either). Until people push the demands for faster booting mainstream, hacks like the five-second boot will remain as just that: hacks.
Boot times of 5 minutes wouldn't really bother me all that much - I reboot *maybe* once a month, other than that my computer is either on or suspended (and it only takes two seconds to return to life from suspend). The easy solution is make sure that Windows defaults to suspend/hibernate rather than shut down, since the normal user generally sticks with the default settings.
The things that matter to me are:
Cheaper hardware
More efficient software
Major technology improvements
I'm not at all an environmentalist, but I'd even put making a pc more power efficient, or making the manufacturing more environmentally friendly as more important than shaving a few more seconds off my boot time.
What really gets me is not just the boot time but the shutdown time. Especially because I often reboot (shutdown time + boot time).
When I tell my PC to shut down, all it really needs to do is make sure that no files are currently being written to disk, force a dismount of all drives, and then cut the power. Everything else is bad programming, as far as I can see. Why does the network have to shut down? Why do a whole load of separate processes have to be given signals? Why does KDE need time to save settings (it should have already saved them in real time)?
If the computer is not doing anything, a clean shutdown should take no more than a second, and yet it can take much longer.
My 10 MHz '286 running DOS 3.3 used to go from power to prompt in 11 seconds. Humans wake up. Old radios warm up. Computers boot up.
as long as my pc boots quicker than i can make a coffee then its a winna
Useless and a waste of development. Just put the computer to sleep, and it boots in 2 seconds. Why bother wasting time on this?
"there is something deeply wrong when text editing on a 3.6 ghz processor is anything but instantaneous." --John Carmack
I run OSX 10.5.5 on a basic X86 PC; C2D 2.4 GHZ with 4GB of PC2-6400 RAM.
I boot to my desktop in less than 20 seconds.
My startup programs include the Gmail notifier.
Join the darkside.
I got sick of these outrageous boot times a long time ago.
here is how i fixed it:
I have an old IBM PS/1 that i picked up in the early 90's. (for the kids: 386 processor, 2 megs of RAM)
When I turn it on, the system is usable in about 5-10 seconds.
I can have a word processor open AND be typing away happily within 15 seconds of hitting that button.
now it takes me a minute to load my OS, and another 20 seconds before my word processor is usable
what the hell happened?
-I only code in BASIC.-
I'm going to have to link to an article I read a few days ago: http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/
In short it's about some Intel hackers makes Fedora boot in 5 secounds on an EEE PC, not exactly the best hardware.
I've been using standby/sleep extensively on my desktops and laptops for the last 10 years, and I still can't understand why people with a modern machine don't use standby.
Yes back in the early days it could be flaky, but I've had very very few problems resuming from standby since about 2002.
On my current laptop, Dell latitude D820/vista I can standby in probably 10 seconds (max, often its near instant) and I can resume in less than 5
And it will happily sit in my bag for about 2 weeks while on standby before the battery is drained (but before that happens it will wake up to hibernate).
My desktop pc is on 24/7, with a 2 hour sleep timeout.
Both machines only ever get rebooted for patches. Yes they take a while to boot, but who cares? Once a month I press restart and get a coffee.
"and an HP source names an 18-month goal of 20-30 seconds."
I recently downgraded to an old laptop HP laptop gifted to me by my mother. This laptop (Presario 1700) has 256MB RAM, a 1133MHz Intel Pentium III CPU, 40GB HDD and a 16MB ATi Mobility Radeon M6 LY GPU.
In regards to boot times, after reformatting the drive, and reinstalling Windows XP the boot time was very fast. A few months down the track the only difference from then is I have installed old games, namely Fallout 1 and 2, Heroes III and Ragnarok. As well as K-Meleon for web browsing, Sylpheed as an e-mail client, OpenOffice 3 for word processing (need .docx support!), foobar2000 etc etc.
My point is, after installing these programs, stopping apps from starting upon startup and not running an antivirus I timed my laptop from cold boot to desktop at 35 seconds (skips login).
I am impressed with this result the laptop will then go into warm boots from standby for a couple of days, only really turning it off when the page file is pushing it
My system used to boot quickly enough for my tastes, until I enabled disk quota. Now, when I have an unclean shutdown (and I hardly ever have clean ones), the system spends several _hours_ running quotacheck. Isn't there some way to reduce this? I read something that suggests there are journalled quota nowadays, but how do they work and which filesystems are supported?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
My MacBook Pro wakes up in one second, so why should I ever shut it down? The only time I ever restart it is after a system software upgrade that requires it.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
Not that I usually go out of my way to defend Vista, but the Dell Vostro 1500 running Vista SP1 that I'm typing this on does exactly what you describe.
Apart from security updates - which occur usually once a month - it never gets rebooted (and reboots do take longer than I'd prefer, but have never timed it), and I always just use Vista sleep in-between sessions. It's pretty much ready as soon as I finish opening the lid, and I'm happy with that as an instant-on.
I just got a SSD drive yesterday. From what I see, once I hit a desktop there is no sluggishness at all. Most of the startup stuff is executed all at once and the programs are all over the disk. This is a really bad usage scenario for a spinning disk- it chugs to a crawl- but for a solid-state drive its not a big deal.
My Sinclair ZX Spectrum is ready in less than 2 seconds. Now I have made an ethernet card for it, I can be on IRC within 5 seconds of power up!
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Vendors should consider not pre-installing so much junk on their machines and including a spiffed up variant of Altiris SVS, as well as some other tools that can fight bloat in the background.
I've seen some pretty bad machines from vendors under specced with ram, like 256mb for Windows XP, they would then preinstall something like Norton Internet Security which requires 256mb of RAM available and that's before you do a scan.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
"If it took long enough for you to notice then something must have been wrong"
Actually that is one of the reasons why things are still slow in general - because though CPUs and hardware get faster and faster, we're still living in a human world. So the "human notice" times remain important.
Lots of programmers have their programs wait for one second if they have to wait a minimum time for hardware or for other reasons, after all most seem to think "it's only one second".
A few 1 seconds here and it all adds up.
Silly? Maybe in many cases, BUT often you really do have to wait in seconds because it says "press ctrl-A for SCSI controller config" and so if the computer does not wait _seconds_ for the human and only waits _milliseconds_, the human is also going to be pissed off.
For a similar reason a windows PC can't boot faster than the X seconds for you to press F8 to enter "Safe Mode". Well it can, but it'll have to be "hold F8 down while booting", and that means some changes in the keyboard hardware and config stuff, some user education etc etc.
Also often the threshold for determining that something has gone wrong is more _human_ related. Say a hard drive has gone slightly flaky and takes a bit longer to spin up for whatever reason.
How long will a human wait for a harddrive to spin up? Pretty long in many cases. Even if it takes 30 seconds, they might still wait.
The BIOS could just assume it's dead, after all it's not behaving like a _normal_ hard drive. But the specs for _failure_ are often human related - they are determined by how long it is expected that a human will wait.
It's just like network connectivity timeouts are in the order of tens of seconds. Instead of say minutes. A tree might be willing to wait minutes or even days, but most humans don't want to wait minutes.
They're not in the order of milliseconds because the speed of light is too slow (light takes more than a few milliseconds to cross the world) and people are willing to wait seconds.
Why doesn't every company / office apply a policy, that every desktop computer is configured to hibernate itself after e.g. one our of idling? Startup time will become meaningless and evergy savings would be huge (compared to 24/7 workstation uptimes). Personally I've never understood this boot time debate. I never shutdown my Macbook, which will wake from sleep in a second. AFAIK modern desktops are able to sleep/hibernate as well, maybe excluding some poor 3D drivers on Linux which cannot recover from sleep state. In the name of energy saving, every computer sold should be configured by default to sleep/hibernate after unused period of time, like every Mac does (don't they?).
25 seconds is becoming the normal start up time of Linux.
The side branch of linux kernel fastboot has got 5-10 seconds to work. Ok some sections of that have to be improved in the way they are done so its stable. Key thing to under 30 seconds is how long the bios takes to get threw.
Yes boot times of the Linux is reducing. 15 seconds will be more than possible. This is full OS no real cheating.
Cheating boot times under 3 seconds is possible. Raw dumping a pre inited image into memory.
I'd be interested to know what the consumption would be when measured with a power meter.
My Macbook pro (battery almost 3 years old) gets about 72 hours of sleep time with intermittent wakeups for quick email via wi-fi. I would not even attempt that with my ubuntu thinkpad - unfortunately.
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Having extra stuff installed is not a problem per se, at least not on linux or osx...
Having extra stuff loaded at startup is an issue...
Having extra stuff which cannot be removed is an issue...
On windows, merely installing something typically adds crap to the registry which has to be loaded anyway, even if you never use the program itself, there are often update daemons loaded at startup because there's no other way to keep arbitrary apps up to date and uninstall programs work on the principle of trusting the app vendor to provide a working uninstaller, and they are usually completely half assed and dysfunctional because the app vendors doesn't want their app to be removed and isn't going to assign much priority to it.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
If anyone out there with a slow booting XP system wants to see what's taking the time I've found this little utility very useful in the past.
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/System-Tweak/BootVis.shtml
In case you're interested in power consumption, my MacPro V8 draws 12 watts when asleep. When waking from sleep it's ready to go in about 2 seconds (but my main monitor is not... it's a 20" Sumsung and it takes it around 4 seconds to come alive). It's drawing its normal 206 watts right now with 11 apps open (and 1 is Fusion running XP), and I've only seen it hit its max of 260 when encoding several movies at once. Core temperatures at the moment are 86F, way lower than the water-cooled Quad G5 I used to have. But back to topic, it boots in 60 seconds. Used to be less before I loaded quite a few startup tasks, and it only gets booted after major system updates. I usually just walk away from it and let it go to sleep. So for me, boot time isn't an issue I have to deal with.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
I concur. My (ancient) Dell Dimension 5100 running Vista sleeps every bit as reliably as my MacBook. My gf has a Vista laptop and that works well too. No problems with Vista sleep.
I'm sorry Slashdotters, but Vista has some genuine improvements, it's not only a huge pile of rubbish and I much prefer it to XP.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
Vista has low power draw when asleep. I haven't measured it directly myself, but reports on Slashdot about 6months ago put it at a few watts.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
I mean, with hibernation and standby modes, outside the need to restart for some sort of update--why even shutdown?
Because the hardware that you happen to own does a half-behinded job of coming out of standby or hibernation. I've seen plenty of PCs that come back with a black screen, with no sound, etc.
I'm thinking of having standard icons for stuff like "Software phones home";"requires TSR agent on start up";"tries to update itself over the internet";"is shareware" "is freeware";"contains DRM measures that cannot be circumvented under the DMCA or equivalent legistlation"; etc. etc.
A company releasing software that does not comply with "what it says on the tin" would be named and shamed.
I reboot *maybe* once a month
Which virtual machine do you use when you want to run programs made for the "other" operating system?
other than that my computer is either on or suspended (and it only takes two seconds to return to life from suspend)
Which brand of PC did you buy, so that I know what to buy if I'm looking for hardware whose suspend support isn't completely defective to the point where un-hibernating brings up a black screen more often than not?
between real hardware and virtual one. Every OS I've seen boots faster in Virtualbox than it does on real hardware. So it is at least partially hardware problem. Autostarted programs are another issue though.
Why does it take the Wii a good 30 seconds to start playing a game from the time you push the power button? (I'm including in here the time it takes to acknowledge the safety warning and click through the Wii menu.) I'm sure that the 360 and PS3 are just as bad.
And (probably unique to the Wii), why do I have to see one or two more safety warnings every time the game loads?
And (definitely not unique to the Wii), why do I have to watch multiple studio logos before I even get to the start screen. The record that I found, was one game that had EIGHT studio ads!!
But, how about DVD players. My player takes somewhere in the 20 second range to load a disc and then I have usually a few (usually) skippable ads followed by 10-15 seconds of unskippable menu animations.
I'm still holding out on Blu-Ray because one recent review of a new Sony player was talking about how fast it was - 1 minute to start up - 1 minute to load the disc. That's two full minutes before even the ads start to play!
I kinda miss the 80's, when you stuck your VHS tape in and the movie started right away. Any ads? Then just rewind back only to the start of the movie and you'll never see them again. You took Super Mario Bros and put it in your Nintendo. In under five seconds, you're asked if you wanted to play with one or two people. After you make that choice, within a second you're playing the game.
Norton is a problem. It's so busy scanning every write to disk, every network connection, every web page, and every registry change that there's no time left to do any work. The performance loss from Norton is so large, it's often cheaper and faster to use less powerful and effective tools (like ClamAV for email processing) and suffer the malware and zombied machine performance losses. And my goodness, Norton and McAfee screw around with your kernels in undocumented ways that break other software in unpredictable and difficult to debug fashion. "Reboot the PC' only works to clear it after "Uninstalling the anti-virus software". Merely turning off the anti-virus software is not enough: it remains resident in your kernels and drivers until deleted.
Vista often powers up my laptop at 4 am from hibernate. It appears that because you can't really switch off a laptop except by extracting the battery, it's always ready to software power-on. This means that events and timed events can power it up. For example, the network card powered it up because the LAN server complains that it can't get a connection (obviously because it's powered off). I've meticulously removed all timed events and converted them to conditional events (at logon, for example), but some still remain. It's still not safe to leave it on hibernate or standby. This is behavior completely inexcusable for any OS in a laptop.
Win98SE FTW!
Well, the wish to boot fast is actually under attack from many corners. First off, if you want to boot fast you have to scrap the proprietary BIOSes, or over-intrusive BIOSes altogether. BIOS as we still have it now, is a remnant of the past. Granted the first instruction the CPU does when machine is hot-powered comes from the BIOS-owned storage. And 'owned' is the keyword here. We are still dealing with closed-source BIOSes, and they also do like to take their time.
Most of the services they provide are today irrelevant and rudimentary. So part of the solution is to minimize time spent in BIOS bootstrapping. Apple does it partially with its EFI-like OpenFirmware, and Intel has sort of caught on with their EFI too. So it is true that Apple people are living in the future. We only have BIOS because apparently someone needs it. But I am sure these folks are nowhere near the mass of people who just simply cannot understand why we still have those ancient cemented irreplaceable proprietary blobs of code on modern motherboards. Granted motherboard makers tweak their own little quirks like buggy ACPI tables etc in their blackbox-like BIOS ROMs, but then this is yet another reason to get rid of this culture. I may be idealistic, but Linux caught on, and I think BIOSes will go away soon too.
Another thing I see is research into compilation techniques and software analysis. This has a bit to do with the usual cry for "do it in assembler if you need speed". What this essentially means is that manual human labour in assembly language deems faster leaner code than that same assembler code spit out by a C compiler for instance. The truth is, the compilers are still introducing runtime overhead, which ideally they should not, especially considering that C was designed to translate into RISC/CISC fairly strictly, i.e. a sort of zero-overhead principle compared to manual assembler skills. So the solution is to make more complex compilers which will deal with overhead more efficiently. This will compensate for over-intrusive C programmers that like to abstract their software to the point where their C programs look like a mutated object oriented C++ template mess, painted with macros. I have seen it, and it does look ugly, no wonder the finite-state-machine compiler has no chance whatsoever to claim zero-overhead then.
A bit related to the above is a technique which will take advantage over parallel processes in hardware. Someone here claimed that Asus EEE starts much faster much thanks to its solid state drives, which do not have to spin up. This is simply incorrect as a reason. First, a modern harddrive spins up in a second on average, which is hardly a big deal compared to the overall boot time. Second, it is simply the inability and inflexibility of a bootstrap routine to account for this spinning-up time and do something useful while the disk spins up. This spinning-up hardly blocks the CPU, or other peripherals. So in essence, we are again to blame only ourselves as programmers who are unable to parallelize the bootstrapping efficiently. Incidentally since an Intel x86 CPU is super-scalar and benefits greatly from it, there is no reason we cannot make compilers that emit superscalar software - software that also does out-of-order execution of independent code paths in parallel.
We are just lazy. All we want is to sleep, fuck and eat. The rest comes after. Faster boot up time of our computers is not very important, it is just a small nerdish annoyance :-) There are critical annoyances like bad expensive closed-source software, and then there are the "slow boot" annoyances.
Linux actually can boot really quick. The kernel takes relatively trivial amount of time to get to 'init'. At that point, the distributions make choices in userspace that may make a distribution slow or fast to boot.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"Haiku is nothing special except maybe it can get a Guinness record for taking more than seven years to produce an Alpha."
I thought that went to hurd.
I'm sorry to hear that suspend to RAM didn't work for you. I think MS did well to get it working well on as many computers as they have done and this is one of those areas where Linux has to work hard to even achieve parity.
Having said that, do you know what kernel you are running? Every release of the linux kernel more fixes go in that enable more machines to work (my own suspend problem was fixed in 2.6.26). If you are using a year old kernel then the tedious advice of "test the latest live CD" (which should have a recent kernel and does not need to be installed to do this test) may yield a different result. With 2.6.27 hopefully things are reaching the point where it should be more likely than not to work...
One thing to note though is that if you are using binary only drivers all bets are off. Those can take huge amounts of tweaking to get going with suspend to RAM and there's no guarantee of success even after hours of trying. If it turns out your problem is binary only driver related it's probably better to give up on suspend to RAM...
PCs should turn on as fast as a Commodore 64. Sure a C64 had a 10K more or less firmware system. But it ran at 1 MHz. And it was made at a time when 8K ROM chips cost $10. All the numbers are x1000 now. 8M byte Flash ROMs selling for $1 or less running on 1Gig Hz processors.
PCs take 60+ seconds from power-on to use because they always have since 1984. Microsoft expects to be able to have 60+ to fool around (excuse me, 'boot' the OS) before the users demand response.
PCs should have the option of delivering a command line or keyboard menu for selecting the user's desired application in a second or less. The first OS maker to do this is going to be considered the leader in the next generation of personal computers.
It's simple statistics: if the time the computer spends on the boot process exceeds the time it spends computing till the next crash or shutdown, that's uneconomical. Fortunately, the average uptime for today's Windows well exceeds twelve hours.
I've done that too. And the damn thing didn't even work! I had to downgrade to an older version (another 100M, thank you very much HP, would you be so kind to rot in hell please).
"There needs to be an industry wide effort to prevent startup bloatware. Why does windows let AIM install itself as a startup program without having the damn UAC complain that this is a protected area? Why does every HP come with 30 preinstalled programs in the startup? Startup items need to be protected in some way" - by mockidol (1031242) on Sunday October 26, @03:26AM (#25515505)
GOOD point on vendors' loading 3rd party wares on PC startup. Windows ITSELF needs that: All the excessive services it "fires up" @ system startup, most folks do NOT need running - That alone slows up bootup massively (& more, wasting memory, many forms of I/O, & CPU cycles too).
I mean, hey - Any "Tuning Windows" guide, or "speed up Windows" guide (I wrote the very first/oldest one there is/was back in 1997-1998 for NTCompatible.com as their "Article #1" back then, & many have sprung up online since they, sometimes, it is the premise behind entire websites in fact nowadays & for a few years now) which shows anyone how simple this is to do, once you understand what a services does & gives you (or not)...
Fact is - I am surprised that Microsoft has not altered their setup programs for Windows for this actually!
E.G. -> A simple little wizard (almost like SCW (security configuration wizard) is for Windows Server 2003 actually, but a little more "dumbed down" for the avg. user) would do it upon initial setup!
One that would ask people if they are going to have a home network or not (meaning you can cut services like say, WORKSTATION &/or SERVER right off the bat alongside others as well if they don't intend to do this & only have a single system etc.) & more, like defining what a particular services does for a user, in case they are not familiar with it, so they do know whether to keep it running OR, turn it off.
All, as regards services present & set as "AUTOMATIC" startup type in services.msc - they also gain performance this way as well since they're no longer wasting resources or many forms of I/O on running services they don't really need, as a bonus, not just faster startup times.
APK
Once upon a time most computers had large portions of their OS in ROM. This was fast to access and routinely gave sub second boots. However these days economic pressures coupled with the need to be able to change things after delivery means that few new (desktop) computers are still able to keep the entire OS in ROM and it needs to be loaded into RAM from disk.
While CPU speeds have doubled every few years, the time to access data from (conventional) disks has not halved at nearly the same rate. In fact, if you look at the time it takes to seek to random data you will find seek times have not fallen dramatically in the past decade (they seem to have remained between 4-10ms even as disks have become bigger). This has led to IO becoming a dominant factor in regular computer usage.
As the demand for OSes to do more (GUI, networking, ability to accommodate hotplugging, more devices) increases the size of the OS will slowly rise. Quite often support for large classes of older devices cannot be dropped (otherwise they will stop working) so the need to probe for them lives on. Prettier (and bigger as screen resolutions slowly increase) graphics come with a bigger footprint. Ultimately all this data has to live somewhere but can only be loaded so fast.
Solid state disks will help a bit (especially where data would otherwise be fragmented) but fixed, unchanging installations like TVs will have a massive edge over general purposes computers in boot speed for the foreseeable future.
On another note I remember having to load programs from cassette tape. This could take up to 20 minutes (and there was no guarantee the process would work). By comparison programs on modern machines seem to load at lightening speed. I also remember at the same time loading programs from cartridges. This seemed to take no more than 3 seconds in the worst case. By comparison today's programs seem to plod slothfully into place. Things are simultaneously worse and better!
I remember blowing into the Nintendo cartridges and screwing around with them for a good 15 minutes before they would work.
Close it when I'm done, it just goes to sleep. Open it when I need a quick weather map, it takes but 2 seconds to connect and fetch the map, then just close it. And it always works just like that.
Let's see Vista do that! PS Windoze really does blow chunks.
Are you really that ignorant?
I mean, seriously. I reboot my machine once a month. And I close the lid on the VISTA X64 powered machine at least daily. It's my TV, my computer and my stereo, so it actually happens, more like, 4 or 5 times a day.
But seriously... Do you NEVER really open your eyes to anything else around you, unless it has an Apple on the front.
And here's a question, which OS had the sleep / hibernate feature first? I > win95, but since I REFUSED to have a laptop until the last couple years, it was never a feature I looked at or cared about until recently.
--Toll_Free
With fastboot patches and lots of devices turned off, I can have the Linux kernel take around one second to start the root filesystem on my EeePC. However the more I turn on the longer this becomes. A regular kernel will be closer to five seconds to rootfs.
If you have certain hardware (e.g. arrays of disks that need to spin up when probed) this process may take much longer (minutes...) and there will be little the kernel can do...
I'm sorry Slashdotters, but Vista has some genuine improvements, it's not only a huge pile of rubbish and I much prefer it to XP.
I also concur.
I've noticed, most people that slam a new OS when it arrives, and for about 1 1/2 years afterwards, are people that attempt to load the beta onto either OLD hardware, or bleeding edge (read, crappy drivers are the ONLY drivers). If you purchase NAME brand equipment (instead of the graphics card thats the "same" as the 400.00 card, but only costs 79.99 from geeks), quality ram, etc., most OS's are fairly decent.
I'm having problems on my "living room" machine now. It's running an old Athlon 1600+, half a gig of ram, and hard drives over a decade old in it. Ubuntu is shit because it locks up daily. No, in reality, my old hardware is shit, and I know it.
I could load Vista on it, and blame it, though, quite easily. Like what seems to be in vogue.
Yes, Vista has a few annoyances, but if you run it on decent hardware, it works quite well. My uptime is a month (and I reboot because I want to, not because it has to have it, unless it's for "patch Tuesday") usually, and this machine is HAMMERED upon daily.
Take it for what it's worth. All OS's have their place. After playing with Ubuntu, I could NOT give it to my grandmother to use. However, Windows works fine on the her machine now. Getting her to click on the network icon every time the machine boots up (she shuts it down every time she's done, 2 or 3 reboots a day, UGGH) and then click on her wireless network would be a lesson in futility. I know, she asked me why I had to do it each time last time she was here and wanted to use the living room machine.
Sad, but true. Here's to the next revision FIXING that.
--Toll_Free
Sounds kind of like a husband.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
My PowerBook does that, too, but it's a 2005 model.
Sent from my iPhone
I just use linux. My PC boots, from the moment I hit power until the time I have a usable desktop (excluding the login screen, because that's waiting on me for password), in about 30-40 seconds, except the one day a month where I have it fsck all my drives. Not quite that "20 seconds" that's "optimal", but I'd say it's a great number.
:(){
My PCs boot with a thin client option. If you choose to boot thin client it PXE boots from the server, downloads a minimal OS and starts a session on the server. I get a desktop in about 10 seconds.
I have to think that delays getting the computer up and running with a full desktop is about these things:
IOPS. Data is scattered all over the drive and you've got to get thousands of little settings to provide the environment. It's not a huge amount of data, but it is thousands of data requests. A good SLC (Single Level Cell) SSD will help here. They get 80-100 thousand IOPS, or a little more that a thousand times as many as a spinning drive. These are spendy right now but they will come down in price. There is no good reason why a SLC costs 10 times what a MLC costs based on the technology. Implementation of the SLC is simpler and more reliable and individual cells are only half as dense - not .1x. Or you could just drop it to 2 or three I/O requests by compiling System, Network and User configuration data into single blocks to be loaded each with a single read. But they won't do that as syncing issues are a nuisance.
Hardware waits - Video and network mostly. These should be done in parallel. This is probably what they're working on in TFA. It's such a small part of the problem, though, that it's unlikely to yield the results they claim to be looking for.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You'd save more power by shipping OS's with better default power saving settings than by praying that quicker boot times leads to more people power cycling their machines every day - it wont, not until a power cycle is as quick as wakeup from standby AND remembers your last running state.
It's my "office computer" and my "gaming computer". I usually don't load all the craps on it. I have other computers for that. I kill all the apps in the start up, except drivers and virtual printer (print to .pdf). Mail and messenger start by default, the mail even gets all the mail before Nod32 comes up.
And yes, I can get to a usable windows in ~ 15 seconds.
The only thing I hate is the hang up at the shut down. I expect to press the power button and be done with it... but no, something has to pop up and ask me for interaction. So now my power button sends my computer in sleep mode. And I shut it down only when I'm out for a day or so.
One of the many ways these companies have cut boot times is to disable S.M.A.R.T. testing at boot.
Of course, S.M.A.R.T. has saved countless users from total hard disk failure and total loss of data.
To me the answer isn't cutting seconds, but explaining the seconds. If users know that the extra 2 seconds could save them from losing their precious baby photos, I doubt anyone would complain.
My sentiments exactly. Quite a few replies state "because you MAY have added/changed/eaten xxx" - it is exactly my point that I don't. And if I do I jolly well know about it, and I'm quite happy memorising (or even -gasp- RTFM) a command to manually trigger an update or whatever other start mechanism would exist.
I just resent spending the time on what amounts to doing a full emission test, engine tuning and tyre thread depth check every time I start my car..
Insert
If we used ROM to hold the OS, it could boot in seconds and would be much more resistant to viruses. The cost for memory is low enough that it should be relatively cheap to design some sort of OS EEPROM, and have a slot for it to fit into the motherboard of the computer. OF course, then we would have to deal with writing OS's that are designed to run in memory.
It takes my Vista PC, with very average hardware, approximately 15-20 seconds to fully boot. I also find with Vista that I can actually start "doing stuff" as soon as the desktop appears. Where-as on my work PC (which runs Win XP Pro), It still boots around the same length of time, but XP doesn't allow me to launch programs or anything for at least 10+ seconds after the desktop appears.
Anyway, my point is that it seems a lot of these people with extremely long boot times maybe need to clean up their PC's. My girlfriend's laptop takes almost a minute to boot because of all the shit she has loaded on there.
yes, get back to me when your precious commodore supports LAN, WLAN, 3D graphics, hundreds of input and output peripherals and the literal million things that a modern PC can do
But on my 3.2 bajigahertz Pentium Dual-Quad PosiTraction(tm) Gold Edition PC that I'm typing this on:
- I don't use "hundreds of input and output peripherals". I use two. One more than I did on my C-64.
- I don't do any WLAN stuff ever. Just like I didn't on my C-64.
- I don't use anything LAN related on boot. Just like I didn't on my C-64.
- I don't use 3D graphics on boot. Just like I didn't on my C-64. Granted, I do use them when playing 3D games, but that's well after boot. And when I do use 3D graphics, I have a whole separate high-performance hardware subsystem dedicated solely to generating those 3D graphics. And guess what? My system's 3D performance is far *better* than that of my C-64's, while simultaneously delivering far *better* quality! Why can I have both speed and quality improvements in 3D graphics but not in boot time?
- I don't do a "million things" on boot. I rarely want to do more than one: select a local application which needs no LAN access and run it. Just like I did on my C-64.
So, it appears that your defense of PC boot slowness reduces to: "You're using a mouse now. That makes the 2 second boot times you got with your 1 MHz C-64 physically impossible, even with hardware that runs at THREE THOUSAND TIMES THAT SPEED and has over THIRTY THOUSAND TIMES the amount of RAM." Yeah, everything looks worse in black and white, doesn't it?
Here's the fact jack: PCs boot slow because users tolerate it. If all of a sudden PCs that took minutes to boot to a state where you could run Notepad started sitting on the shelves, guess what? Right: The problem would get solved. Very quickly. Why? Because all of a sudden there would be value to the MS's, Linuxes, and Dells of the world in doing the work required to make boot times what they should be.
This is purely and Econ 101 issue, not a technical one. It's called Gresham's Law: "Bad money drives out good". An Entity produces two PCs. One takes a second to boot, one takes two minutes to boot. Suckers I mean Customers accept either because they don't know any better, and once booted they both do pretty much the same thing anyway. Entity realizes this, and thinks to itself, "Hey, why are we busting our humps doing good work (1 second boot) when we can do shoddy work (2 minute boot) and sell just as many units at the same price?" That thinking immediately get translated into company policy to spend no effort worrying about boot time, and soon everybody has slow boot times.
But what can the sucker that *does* want non-slow boot times do? Pretty much nothing. A well-done, higly-publicized, up-to-date "consumer reports style" comparison of boot times of all currently available systems*OSes*configurations (I'm looking at you, Tom's Hardware) could conceivably force enough of a shift in the "fast and slow have equal value" situation to make it worth vendors' time to spend some effort on improving boot times, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
There is a reason for this "sloppyness": hardware is cheap while developer time is not.
Unless that developer is waiting for his machine to boot. Then, apparently, said developer's time is without cost.
Although they did some mods on the kernel side, some Intel guys got Fedora booting on an Eeepc in 5 seconds http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/ -- and by booting, they mean from completely shut off to desktop with cpu and hdd idle, not like windows which loads dlls after you log in
Get Super Mario Brothers from the virtual console on the Wii... you click "start" and within a few seconds you're at the same choice screen. And even better, it saves your state! There's a LOT more data loaded with games any more. Many times those studio logos are masking a much larger load into memory of textures, setting up the engine, etc.
The NES had 2KB of RAM. Cartridges were what, 1MB or so, tops? The Wii has 88MB of RAM just by itself.... it takes time to load that stuff from an optical disc into the proper places in the RAM.
I'm not saying I don't want my games to load faster, or that I don't think the health and safety warnings should be able to be skipped. I just understand why games loaded off of optical discs take a long damn time to get going.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Power consumption in suspend has very little to do with the OS. When the computer is in S3 sleep, its in S3 sleep regardless of what OS it may be running. The only exception being that the OS gets to decide if certain devices remain powered or not.
Power consumption during suspend does have a lot to do with the power supply and main board however. My (Ubuntu) desktop for instance takes 8 watts when completely off (S4, S5) and 9 watts in S3. Personally I think this is kind of crappy, so if I'm going to be away from the computer for more than a day I usually flip the hard power switch to bring the number down to a nice 0.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The PS3 is by far the fastest BluRay player out there and the most upgradeable and useful as a media center, as well as the most powerful. It is the ONLY player worth buying for the non-rich.
Nobody misses the 80s and nobody misses VHS tapes. You're a fucking liar and you should be modded down!
On a modern system, 98 boots up in less than 10 seconds.
Vista, almost a full minute plus.
98 can do almost everything Vista can do (If Microsoft even bothered to make the effort,) so what's the difference?
DRM, HUGE and horribly unoptimized and sloppy code, and last but not least, crap drivers written by third parties.
The last problem will fix itself as devs get used to the way Vista handles everything. the first and second will not go away anytime soon.
If computer makers REALLY wanted boot times under 30 seconds, they'd drop Microsoft altogether, because there's no way a default Vista install will take less than 45 seconds.
MinuetOS, OTOH, with proper tweaking, boots in under 3 seconds (under 5 seconds by default options.) and I've been able to get everything working under it (minus games and MS software, of course.)
Most of the problem lies with the OS manufacturer. Eliminate that factor and you're set to speedy computing.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Mod parent up for truth and funny.
Turns out my mom's been shutting down her computer at midnight every night, and rebooting it at 7am or so with all the bloatware, viruses and aol/yahoo/"antivirus" crap she has on there it's a miracle if it boots in less than 8 minutes to a usable state (once you hit the desktop there's another 4-5 minutes of hard drive grinding as it loads a bunch of useless-ware. Showed her the sleep function, and she's thrilled that the computer "boots" in less than 45 seconds - an 800x improvement.
moox. for a new generation.
A very good PC is one that boots in less than 15 seconds"
"A very good PC is one that boots into Linux, therefore being superior in every way"
There, fixed that for you
Hello everybody. I recently purchased a macbook for school (dont worry i still have a quad core custom built gaming pc at home)
Anyways, booting OS X takes about 10 seconds, AND the battery lasts very long (at least the estimate is long).
When i start XP on my macbook, it takes a while, and i must wait for the system to be responsive. In all i would assume 20+ seconds.
My point to all this is that perhaps the OS is to blame, i cant imagine how muhc time vista takes to load. Improve your OS people!!!
I use sleep and hibernation after a while. The boot time is way faster then my gaming PC.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
which is also the exact thing that i do. both my desktop (winxp) and my macbook are put into standby/sleep when im done using. both take two seconds to wake up and even the desktop draws less than one watt.
"It's not about booting faster, it's about booting in 5 seconds."
http://lwn.net/Articles/299088/
http://lwn.net/Articles/299546/
or a bit more involved:
TCCBOOT compiles and boots a Linux kernel in 15 seconds
http://lwn.net/Articles/108341/
Heres my system specs:
-intel q6600
-asus p5q deluxe
-4 gigs of ram (gskill)
-old harddrive from 2003ish (one i bought failed)
-windows XP pro (runs in selective startup)
My boot time is 22-26 seconds, even with my old junker hard drive, with a new one I expect that number to drop. You just need to turn stuff that you dont use off. I'm considering using a solid state disk for the OS, and a traditional high capacity HD for apps. I think that will help drop it atleast 4-5 seconds, but I dunno.
I have a MacBook (1.5 years old, 2GHz). It boots from power on to login screen in 23 seconds. From login screen to desktop takes 19 seconds. I have not timed it with 'automatic login' to go from power on to desktop. I suspect total time would be slightly less than the 23 + 19.
Power off takes about 11 seconds, unless there are a dozen applications running, then you have to add a few seconds for each app to be shut down.
When I boot, reboot, or shut down a Windows PC at work, I go get a cup of joe to pass the time.
I honestly don't understand this at all. If boot time is important, why not make two simple changes:
User "Shut Down": Reboot, get to login screen, suspend to disk.
User "Power On": Return from suspend.
They are technically simple as well. When the user does a "Shut Down", drop a file in the filssystem somewhere. Reboot. On reaching login, if the file exists, immediately suspend.
The only downside would be a slower shutdown time- but honestly, who cares?
What, you don't have a power off switch? On most laptops just hold down the power button.
I worked in an election campaign in the recent election in Canada. The rental company sent the campaign office a bunch of computers that performed suspiciously poorly and crashed a lot -- the reason? Bad RAM. So bad, that as soon as I turned off ultra-quick-POST, the cursory memory check found it and halted the system.
I always leave the memory test turned on for boot, even though it takes a little while with multiple GB's of RAM for two reasons:
1. If RAM has somehow failed, it might find it.
2. Testing the RAM blanks it, which means there's less chance of someone being able to cold boot the system and try to recover passwords out of the RAM before it fades (/. ran a story about that a few months ago I think).
In about 1985 I was able to reboot my MS-DOS computer in eight seconds. My TSR ran at the end of AUTOEXEC.BAT and stored an image of all lower memeory into an L.I.M. RAM card bank. Press Ctrl+Alt+Ins and the TSR would reload lower memory from the RAM bank. Eight seconds to reboot.
Linux suggestion: save ASCII config file timestamps and corresponding kernel structures. If the ASCII config file is unchanged, then reload the internal structure without any recomputation.
Very true 1.5 minute boot up on OS X generally means one of three things:
1. Corrupt fonts,, validate them with forntbook done
2. HP Scanner or Printer "device manager" solution designate one of you computer as print station and delte that software off the rest of your computers
3. Old cache files or file system permission problems, run cocktail or Onyx and fix these as well.
Having done that my MacBook running leopard off a slow 80 gig 5200 rpm notebook drive takes about 45 seconds to boot.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Either A) leave the computer on B) when you get home turn computer on, get beer, take off shoes, etc, than go to your "magically" booted OS or C) turn on computer when you wake up, take shower, grab beer, etc, than go to your "magically" booted OS.
The above poster is obviously not merely a fanatic - but the most hilarious type of fanatic. He didn't even pick something substantial (like a religion or an ideology) to go gaga over.
Instead, he is fighting tirelessly for the right not to have to unclick a checkbox to avoid Steam loading at startup!
It takes a Mac to boot in 30 seconds.
As much as I detest apple, they have good boot time.
That's not Gresham's Law. If PCs were money, which they aren't, and if people were fanatically buying the 1 minute boot time PCs and hoarding them while using the 2 minute boot time PCs to pay for things (because they are both legal tender), then we would have a great example of Gresham's Law in action.
People do in fact care about boot times, which is one of the reasons SSD is taking off. It's also part of the reason people have been buying faster CPUs since the days of the C64. However, people also care about having functionality and eye candy. So they make a choice, weighing up boot time and general speed versus functionality/ eye candy. In the end boot time is where it is in the scheme of things for a reason. Even in the Linux world where people have a real choice over some sort of functional obsolescent choice, Ubuntu dominates over the likes of Puppy or DSL.
Now we are reaching the point of diminishing marginal returns in computing for all sorts of things, e.g. eye candy (compiz and aero, how much better can it really get?), functionality (excel has been largely right for 11 years), speed, ability to multi-task (dual core). Some remaining areas of concern are power, boot-up times, gaming for 1920x1200 resolutions, that sort of thing, which is why we are reading about them here.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
and get BOOT BIOS on peripherals working properly, so that if your BIOS asks if it's still the same IDE card, it goes "yes" or "no" and the BIOS can either load the working options from flash or probe if it says "nope".