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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.