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.

Comments

So...

[MaverickMila]

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.

Re:So...

[Z00L00K]

Boot time is a pain that we have had since the first IBM PC was released. And it's not only boot time but also shut down time that can be painful.

And for networked PC:s with a roaming profile you will get raped in boot time whenever you have a large profile for some reason.

Some of the time that it takes originates from the "need" to count memory and some for waiting on a bunch of devices to initialize and start. No parallel tasks during startup at all.

Only computer with a decent startup (under a second) that I have experienced was a computer with a ROM Basic interpreter, but then, that's a completely different animal.

Re:So...

[MPAB]

I don't mind boot time so much - what really gets on my nerves is when a machine comes on, pretends it's ready but is then maybe five minutes doing other stuff before you can actually use it while you stare at the screen and frustratedly try to click on things. That's especially bad in the roaming profile scenario you mentioned.

That's perhaps the worst part, as most people that have no idea of how a computer works will start clicking on progran after program, thus starting yet another parallel process that adds up to the rest. And parallel processes take more than the same ones in series because of memory/disk seek times and the need to share a common pipeline.
I always try to encourage people not to "start" after the screen appears, but after "the red light goes from always on to scarcely blinking". Of course most people ignore the advice and press things frantically till they end up CTRL-ALT-DELing and thinking it did the trick.

Re:So...

[electrictroy]

>>>Boot time is a pain that we have had since the first IBM PC was released. And it's not only boot time but also shut down time that can be painful.

I disagree. Shutdown time is no big deal because you can go grab a snack while the computer shutsdown. You don't have to wait.

As for startup time, back in the days of floppy-based OSes like the IBM or Commodore Amiga, it only took 5 seconds to go from turn-on to a CLI or Workbench interface. Even faster with a hard drive.

The reason today's computers are so ridiculously slow is because they load a bunch of crap. Why? Do I need to have Itunes or Quicktime or Microsoft Office preloaded in the background? Absolutely not. If they followed the philosophy of earlier OSes, where programs were only loaded *when needed*, then the bootup time would be very short.

Re:So...

[Anpheus]

Your printer driver is now a complete rendering engine for a number of different formats that you may never use.

I don't understand.

[cephalien]

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.

Re:I don't understand.

[PhantomHarlock]

BEos and it's original hardware was the last, best hope for a solid, no B.S. modern computer that was re-designed from scratch for maximum performance with pre-emtpive multitasking.

I see it as a chicken and egg problem. The barrier to entry in the OS market is extremely tough because software manufacturers won't invest the time in porting their apps unless the hardware or OS is established, and that can't happen without the software. The OS market is well beyond it's infancy now, not that it's a good thing.

The way I see it, it would have to get much, much worse than it is now for companies like Adobe to say "hey, lets throw our weight behind this new OS/Platform." For example, if MS completely bungled Windows 7, or whatever they are calling it these days. Two failed OS's in a row, and maybe it will finally make a dent in their market share. And I don't much like apple because their hardware prices remain artifically high, due to them being the sole provider for both OS and hardware. It doesn't help that MS also makes the world standard of office suites. They will always push their own OS with it first.

The competitiveness of the PC hardware market is excellent, and many previously frustrating compatiblity issues have gone away with the advent of newer motherboards and slot standards, narrowing the hardware quality control and consistency between PC hardware and Mac hardware.

PC hardware with a new OS would be great. Apple understandibly wants to control the hardware that Mac OSX runs on, because it's much easier to assure qualtiy and provide support that way. But that support comes at a cost. What we need is an OS that runs on generic hardware that is written from scratch for lean performance, by neither of those two vendors.

Re:I don't understand.

[PhantomHarlock]

Probably the most annoying side effect of digital tuners. It has to find the stream and begin to decode it. Your old TV changed channels instantly because it was an analog tuner with pre-set frequency decoding for each channel position. The TV did no thinking, it simply is looking at a different frequency on the receiver and de-modulating it into the CRT, and all of that happens at the speed of light.

Newer tuners are all digital, and while you generally get better picture quality even on analog channels, it has to capture the analog or digital transmission, decode it / encode it and then pass it on to the LCD display. Typically there's some 'start time' involved in this. I expect that particular feature will be a selling point to differentiate TVs in the future, once they've run out of other things and the tuner hardware becomes more powerful.

Re:I don't understand.

[davester666]

Obviously, we must stop using using pansy C/C++/Java/Ruby/etc... languages and go back to writing everything in assembler. Then boot times will rock!

Duh.

Re:I don't understand.

[dreamchaser]

He said 'written for lean performance'. That is not Linux. I'm not saying Linux performs poorly, but it's hardly designed with performance being the primary goal, and it *certainly* doesn't boot nearly as fast as BeOS did.

Re:I don't understand.

[DerWulf]

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. There is a reason for this "sloppyness": hardware is cheap while developer time is not.

Startup Programs

[mockidol]

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.

Re:Startup Programs

[Waccoon]

Well, it would help if people didn't like them so much, or at least tolerate them.

Look at Steam. I hate Steam with a passion on principle, because Valve forced people to install it, and it always ran on the computer even when Valve's games did not. To this day, I still have not installed HL2 or the Orange Box on my system, and I have remained very vocal about the forced installation of background tasks. Other people complained at first, but now, all I hear from people is how awesome Steam is and how they love buying things off it, and I should shut up about it. The fact that it is there all the time, constantly doing things in the background just doesn't phase them. After all, they can simply blame their 3-minute boot times on Microsoft.

What about all the "helper" programs? Every time I install some kind of driver, there's about 3-5 system services that get added to my system. When I search for information about these services, the web pages I encounter tell me that the services are not required, but that they enhance performance, so I shouldn't disable them. Excuse me? Enhance performance? In what respect? What if I only use that part of my system once a day, but it adds about 75-100MB of data to my swap file on startup? If not done correctly, pre-caching can seriously slow down a computer, and I see that every day when I fix other peoples' computers. And yet, other people tell me I shouldn't complain about it?

I stopped using Google Chrome when I found out that it installed an automatic updater with no way to disable it, short of hunting it down and deleting the main executable. Without deleting the file, Chrome just put it right back into active use again. Chrome also used to write about 1.5 gigabytes to my hard drive every time I started it up. Why? Well, that's part of the safe browsing initiative, where the browser downloads and installs a record of bad web sites. What if I have one of those flash drives? Will an app that writes several gigs of data to the drive every day wear it out prematurely? Do the commercial developers care?

No, they don't... because home users don't care, either, or at least they don't know any better.

Meanwhile, people still ask me to fix their computers all the time, and the only thing I can do to keep boot times under a minute is disable half their software. Then, their friends tell them to buy a Mac, and all the performance problems will go away. Is that why my Mac only has Apple software installed and takes 1.5 minutes to boot, whereas my XP system boots in 18 seconds with Apache and MySQL in the background?

It's psychological

[Jazz-Masta]

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.

AHCI Firmware

[boa13]

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. :(

Usually the AV software the extends the time

[mlts]

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.

When rebooting, shutdown time is important

[ChameleonDave]

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.

Gresham's Law

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Faster Boot Times..

[Khyber]

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.