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The Death of Booting Up
theodp writes "'Booting up was a bear,' recalls Slate's Farhad Manjoo, 'something to be avoided at all costs.' But now, he adds, 'It's time to rejoice, because all that's in the past. Computers these days can go from completely off to working within 30 seconds, and in some cases much faster. Apple's MacBook Air loads up in 16 seconds, and machines based on Google's cloud-based Chrome OS boast boot times of under 10 seconds. Even Windows computers are fast — with the right set-up, your Windows 7 laptop can load just as quickly as a MacBook.' Perhaps at home, but how's that working out for you at work? Have reports of the death of long boot times been greatly exaggerated?"
Windows in 30s on an SSD, 60s on a USB3 and even 15s on a SSD Sata III. Proof that disk speed is half the battle.
However, employees still expect to get to work with everything exactly as it was when they left the office. If anything, it's been heavier workloads which have made users less likely to boot. Some have never restarted. It's fine with me, the less chance of BSOD or loading circles the better.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
With suspend-to-RAM, I only boot-up/reboot maybe once a month on each of my Windows computers.. 10 seconds to return to where I was when I "turned it off". Why turn it off, why?
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
My laptop can go for weeks without rebooting. It wakes up within a second. Isn't this decade marvellous? :)
Just because the length of time it takes to boot is decreasing doesn't mean it's going away.
I mean, yeah, I no longer have time to go get a cup of coffee and look at the mail while I wait (unless I'm using my parents computer), but I still have to sit through POST and all that. Seems to me that will never go away, there needs to be a self check...
When I leave work, I hit the power button and the computer starts sleeping. When I come back I hit it again and I'm back to speed in a few seconds. I do a boot after windows updates (and/or when I want the centralized updates) and go drink coffee in the meanwhile. So no, I don't have problems with long boot times.
It is what it is.
19:30:02 up 27 days, 23:39, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
are you saying it's possible to turn my computer off?
There's one good reason why I do that.
I live in a VERY hot country, if I leave my computer on for a long time, the components will just melt, or at least it'll affect performance sooner than it should.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but heat is bad for computer parts.
Suspend to RAM/Sleep keeps everything running, it does save some electricity, but I don't know if the savings are worth it.
Maybe I should try suspending to disk?
My HTC EVO 3D Android phone takes 2.5 minutes to boot.
The best way I have found to speed up the corporate boot process is to disconnect the LAN cable until you are at the desktop, and then restore any drive mappings etc. manually. Even then, it can take several times longer than at home... :(
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
7 Seconds Vertex 3 ssd @ 600mb/s.
good news, because I like to reboot often and hard just in case those memory bits get too comfortable in the same spot they've been sitting for months at a time there.
You can't handle the truth.
Perhaps you are all done when you enter a clean slate boot but I can't start working there. I have to fire up my webbrowser, login to 4-5 different internal systems, fire up a few terminals, load ssh-keys, start my communications apps(skype, mail, im). All this usually takes a lot longer than booting my machine.
I don't shut my work PC down because it takes 4 minutes for the Windows login prompt to appear and another 3 minutes for it to open Notepad.
Unfortunately my debian-running samsung netbook is more like 1 minute to boot up and hibernation does not work ... Not quite there yet.
I hope progress will be made.
Back when I worked at Nokia, my laptop took about 5 mins to boot. It was regular practice to pull the network cable to stop it phoning home ... which took even longer. Logging in from the Windows prompt took a good 30 seconds as it updated profiles and synched user crap. We were all Linux guys, so it was a great laugh.
At my last contract, I was given a corporate laptop - good recent hardware with Win 7 on it, perfectly capable of booting in 60 secs. However the build on it took 2 mins to reach the log-in screen, and a further 5 mins to reach a usable desktop.
This was because there was so much corporate cruft to run before I could be permitted to do actual work.
Naturally, no-one was permitted admin access.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
The worst I've dealt with is the HP DL380. Those things took nearly three minutes just to POST. To access the RAID config you had to hit a key combo within a 3-second window at end of the POST.
That was years ago. I think that was the low point, but that's just anecdotal.
Back in the days when i used an Amiga, it booted in 6 seconds from cold (yes i know, i was sad enough to time it)... And i had to reboot fairly often because the AmigaOS used a flat memory model which suffered from gradual memory fragmentation, and allowed one errant program to take down the whole system.
Later, i moved onto Unix/Linux systems and although they sometimes took a long time to boot, it was extremely rare that you would reboot them.. One of my unix workstations clocked up 700 days of uptime before a power failure took it out for instance.
More recently, with laptops i can just suspend them...
I hate the concept of having to reboot, i usually have a large number of programs running and would hate having to load everything up again and lay them out across my workspaces.
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I use the same mouse and mouse pad at home and work because I got used to the feel. At home, if I press the power button before hooking the mouse back up and putting the mouse pad down, it's already finished booting and waiting for me before I finish. At work, I can go make coffee too before it's done, and that's just to get to the login screen. After loging in, it's another full minute before I can use it.
>"Perhaps at home, but how's that working out for you at work?"
Let me tell you how it works out at work. I just took delivery of brand new HP ML350 G6 servers. 48GB RAM, Dual 6 core Xeons at 3.06Ghz. FAST!
It takes exactly 2.5 *MINUTES* before I get the BIOS beep for it to load GRUB. Linux then takes, oh, 20 seconds to boot (all the way to X), and that is with dozens of services, RAID checks, etc.
I complained bitterly to HP. Sure it won't be booted very often ONCE IT IS CONFIGURED. But it more than DOUBLED the first few man days of setup due to waiting forever every time I made a BIOS change, every time I had to key in a firmware license, upgrade the BIOS, boot into the RAID setup, setup iLO2, after kernel changes, etc.
It is 2011 and the fastest computer I have ever seen is, by far, the slowest booting machine I have ever seen. And I have been doing this for 25 years.
My company installs so much virus scanning, monitoring, automatic software management agents, and hard-drive encryption stuff that they can turn the highest end, fastest booting machine with SSD into a retro X86 in a few seconds... Most of us either NEVER turn the computers off or you turn it on and go n a long coffee break while your computer boots ....To quote a friend - Software is like a gas - it expands to fill every piece of hardware capability
My boot times at work are around the 3 minute mark. I blame it on Windows XP SP2 weighed down with massive amounts of corporate spyware and McAfee virus scanner.
The reason why windows boots up decently fast is because many non-critical services are loaded AFTER login. Hence the computer is barely usable for half a minute after logging in.
Frankly, the new technologies that allow me to boot up my computer and resume my work where I left off in a matter of seconds make it much more likely that I will turn my computer off when I'm not using it.
I've never understood the machismo behind "345 days without rebooting". Unless you're a mission-critical server.
I pay the electric bill, so if I'm not using it, it gets switched off.
I fired up an old win-95 machine about a year ago out of desperation, the thing could go from power off to running word 95 in about 10 seconds flat, I was really impressed, and somewhat saddened by how far we have moved backwards since then.
Booting speed is fine for any OS. But how about the delay between entering your credentials and getting a ready-to-use firefox window ? On my machine it easily doubles the boot up time.
Still takes 5-6 minutes with all the management, inventory and snoopIng tools. So I never turn it off.
My desktop at work is part of a very large (many thousands) windows domain. My time from boot to usable desktop is measured in minutes, many of them, rarely under 10 minutes. I get to stare at "Applying Personal Settings" for much of that period. Yes, the help desk has been called many times. The only course of action is to completely rebuild the system. Nobody can seem to troubleshoot a windows domain performance problem.
I used to never reboot my system, but now I reboot (or rather login and logout) every day.
Why? Because stupid Apple Time Machine will not backup Filevault home directories, unless the user logs out. It's a pain in the ass.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
I'm more interested in the death of roaming profiles. In most cases, they are a total waste of resources and greatly degrade the boot process on office PCs.
We've finally done away with them at our office, and it makes a noticeable difference. Once we realized almost no one uses a computer that isn't theirs, we couldn't figure out a good reason to keep them. Instead, they were replaced with folder redirection and the half-dozen people who frequently logged on to conference room computers were told to save their presentations to a shared folder instead of on their desktop.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
We never turn our computers off at work anyway. We are, however, required to log out. And because we use roaming profiles, which suck, it regularly takes two or three minutes to log back in again, sit through interminable "running login scripts", and finally be faced with a blank desktop where we have to manually open all our applications again, log into half a dozen more services each with its own bizarre password policy, etc.
Boot times, schmoot times. It's the total time to productivity that counts, not how quickly the login screen appears.
Fortunately, I only have to listen to them bitching since I'm not using Windows. I don't even have to say anything any more, just quietly smile. They then go off on all the reasons that they have to have Microsoft, and thus mission accomplished: they've gone from complaining to the counting the benefits.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
They still take ages to boot.
From the beginning of the Windows boot process, to a fully populated and usable desktop, takes my home PC only 9 seconds (no exaggeration, I just timed it). The little Windows animation thing doesn't even half-finish before vanishing. In fact the BIOS takes significantly longer than loading Windows does.
The reason?
- New Corsair Force SSD; and
- I made sure that nothing runs on startup that I don't need
The shut down is even more ridiculous. The "Windows is shutting down..." message barely flickers onto the screen before the machine shuts off.
So yeah, I don't use sleep at all now. Just power down and power back up later. Prior to the SSD my startup took at least 3 times as long (and that was with a 10,000 rpm Raptor, which is no slouch). Buying an SSD was the single best upgrade I have ever bought for any computer - $220 for a huge increase in responsiveness and usability.
My desktop is probably only slightly slower and that one is still on vista and needs replaced maybe I've just lucky in this respect.
It does seem strange to me I'd love to see how fast I could boot them with a fast SSD.
Every morning it takes a good 30min for my machine to become useable after booting/logging in. The sick thing is that this is a brand new core i7 laptop and with all the stuff pushed down, is slower to boot than my old core duo machine from 4 years ago.
I was booting Windows in 20-45 seconds since 1997. Linux can sometimes take a while but usually it's around the 30s and under mark. I'm pretty sure the only laptops that I've ever seen take more than 10-15s, over the last 15 years, are broken Vista laptops.
Macbook Air? Chome OS?
So what is the story here? That computers that no one has are quick to boot?
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
And back in the 80's there was systems that was up and running a lot faster since the core was in PROM. Availability within a second.
And how much power-on self-test to detect changes to the configuration of connected hardware? And how to correct programming defects or add capability to interact with new kinds of hardware?
Short story: I was a consultant and the PC hadn't been in use in about a month. What happened? Installs and reboots and more installs and more reboots, forced AV scans and whatnot. Mandatory, automatic and unstoppable. After that one extreme incident, the client made sure to boot and log in to that PC before I came, easily shaved 15-30 minutes off their bill on average. Employee PCs were usually woken and updated remotely at night though, wasn't an issue for them.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
1) Wake up
2) Turn on laptop (it makes a noise that I can't sleep through)
3) Toilet
4) Breakfast
5) Laptop is ready to use! Wait time: 0 seconds.
My corporation uses McAfee (horrific bloatware in itself), and also deployed SafeBoot full disk encryption to all portable machines. My laptop is a core i7 with 4GB RAM and a reasonably frisky HDD. Booting the work image is about 15 minutes between power on and a usable Windows desktop - literally. It's mostly the SafeBoot crap. Booting the same machine off a Linux USB drive is under 1 minute.
What really cracks me up are tests/reviews of tablets and mobile devices that take in boot time as a significant factor in deciding which has the best "useability". I recently saw a comparison between iPad and Galaxy Tab 7" that concluded that the Apple device booted faster and therefore, inherently, was better. Boot times can surely be important, but the percentage of time spent waiting for a mobile device to boot vs. the overall usage must be... well, small.
"Bees!" - Eddie Izzard
Why turn it off, why?
Leaving a laptop in suspend-to-RAM for a few days will completely drain the battery. I shut down if I don't know if I'll remember to put it on the charger.
When at work loading the corporate systemstack twice: one local XP system and one remote terminalserver session it takes a long 8 minutes before I am logged in. Funny thing is when using my own laptop it just takes a little more then 4 minutes to login at the terminalserver. Too bad that taking your own device with you has been marked as insecure.
This sounds more like the expectations have been lowered then that the problem has been solved. 30sec or even 15sec is still quite a long time, given that my C64 could boot up in 1 second. Even for PC those boot times are nothing special, as DOS or Windows95 could do the same. It also doesn't really matter if its 15sec or 30sec, as both are way to long for quick switching. If booting would be as fast as switching desktops or VTs, it would make OS switching a non issues and could allow new workflows across multiple different OS (like visualization, but without limited 3D support and other problems), but with 15sec switching to one OS and another 15sec to switching back that isn't much fun. And of course the really tricky part isn't just getting the OS to boot, but getting all the applications started and their state restored, it helps little if your OS is ready in 15sec when the application take another 2min to get to a point where the HDD isn't going crazy and the PC is actually fully responsive again.
Essentially, as long as I notice that boot actually exist, its simply not fast enough and given how fast our computers are today, it's just depressing how slow boot has become.
Turn on computer. Get preferred liquid caffeine delivery system. Check to see that computer is still applying policy settings. See if bagels are out yet. Check to see that computer is/is not pushing out more managed antivirus crapware that doesn't work. Wait for logon screen. Yay! Logon. Wait 5 minutes for desktop to become responsive. Start Outlook (ugh). Oops, gotta put in PGP Desktop password. Wait a few minutes before Outlook stops hogging the system. Productivity, here we come!
I've made it a few minutes to half an hour (if EIT pushes out crapware) faster by setting a boot up time in BIOS... about the only good thing going for these DELL boxes. Start the machine an hour before I get in, and I'm usually at a working desktop in 10 minutes after login credentials.
Now, shutting down? How did they manage to make it take 3 minutes to go from the Shut Down call to the dialog asking "are you sure, dude?"???
... time enough to go hit the restroom and come back before it's done booting. Presumably one could also start coffee going in that time but I work with uncouth barbarians who killed our coffee machine.
$ uptime
04:13:18 up 645 days, 18:04, 2 users, load average: 0.69, 0.66, 0.44
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Servers take a long time to boot because they have lots of hardware that has to be set up and configured. It isn't as simple as a desktop. Sure on a desktop system you might have one drive controller, and it might just be AHCI and thus require minimal config time. So that part is fast. However on a server you can have some heavy hitting RAID controllers, that run their own little mini OSes complete with web servers and shit. They take a bit more to configure. Also they can't start all their disks at once, they'd kill the PSU, so they have to stage it.
You also have things that just don't exist in a desktop like RAM configuration. In systems with multiple CPUs and lots of RAM, that has to be set up. Is the memory done NUMA (where each CPU can only access the memory its controller has direct access, and it has to ask the other CPU to get data from the other RAM) or uniform (which means they can both directly access RAM, but it is slower)? Maybe the RAM is actually mirrored, for reliability purposes. That takes configuration time a desktop does not.
Also servers often perform a bit more detailed checks on their hardware. They are expected to be reliable, it is not a bad idea to spend a bit of boot time looking things over.
Thing is, you don't hard boot a server very much so it doesn't matter and fast boot time isn't a real emphasis. You usually keep them on and running at all times so who cares if the boot is pokey? On a desktop, since people often shut them off when not in use, boot time is more important.
I don't care about my PC's boot time, it boots about once a week. The rest is Deep Sleep, and I go fetch a coffee in the mean time anyway.
I don't care about my phone's boot time, it boots about once a month, and is in light Sleep the rest of the time.
I care a little about my netbook's boot time. Usually Deep Sleep though, but I'm usually waiting on it to be ready, so faster is better.
I'm incensed by my cheap Android tablet boot time. It takes long (1 min ?) and switches off daily due to sucky battery. And sleep mode doesn't seem to work, either.
In the end, current boot times are OK with me, technical glitches notwithstanding. I'm getting tired of the boot time dick size comparison, and I'm actually selling my SSD, 'coz I just don't care enough.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Can we all agree to enforce mandatory penalties for programmers (or their bosses) who create services and systray apps? Something that makes them really think about whether or not it's necessary to put some bloated application in my system tray. I'm thinking a wedgie for unnecessary services and a cock punch for unnecessary tray apps. Apple, Java, Adobe, HP, I'm looking at you... I'll admit that I really want to give the Quicktime developers a cock punch.
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion.
My system has SSDs in it, and the UEFI is by far what takes the longest. On power on it takes 29 seconds for the UEFI to finish its crap and hand things over to Windows for boot. From there it takes about 15 seconds to get to a logon screen, mostly because there is tons of hardware to start up. From logon screen to responsive desktop is only about 3 seconds.
My laptop actually boots significantly faster (it also has an SSD). It's BIOS takes much less time to hand off to Windows, and Windows starts faster, probably because there is less hardware.
HP550 laptop
2Ghz Celeron D
1Gb ram
5400rpm disk drive
Time it takes to start up (and get to a usable desktop) is roughly 40 seconds +/- 2 seconds
from power on to post = 16 seconds,
then
from post to desktop [as well as manual login] around 28 seconds.
This is from a stock install, I've not got around to tweaking things to cut any boot times...
I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 not Windows (windows, no matter the version, added another 40 - 65 seconds to boot times on this laptop!)
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
8 seconds UEFI, 2 seconds GRUB, 12 seconds to login prompt or 36 seconds to working KDE Plasma Workspace with some apps like Jabber/e-mail/StatusNet client and music player. Yeah, I work at home, and yeah, I haven't had time to optimize it.
I never shut my laptop off. I close the lid and it goes to sleep for the duration of my commute to and from work. If I don't close the lid it'll go to sleep after 30 minutes.
I only reboot after an update or upgrade that requires it. And then I only do it when I don't mind the wait, usually because I'll go off and do something else.
Boot-up time? Not an issue.
I just tried to recall how long it takes for my MacBook Pro to boot up. I can't remember. I can't remember when was the last time I did shut it down. It is constantly in sleep mode when I'm not using it.
Boot time is more relevant to my office Windows laptop, but the usual array of corpoware would make even Windows 7 to boot for 10-15 minutes.
P.S. And Windows 7 still fails at sleep. Oops, I'm sorry: yes it goes to sleep real well, but my stats show that only on about 30-40% of laptops it manages to wake up... And the 30-40% group is characterized of being "just out of box." Few month down the road - forget about the sleep. But well never mind, Hibernate works in Windows pretty well. I got used to the fact that for working sleep/wake up I have to pay the Apple tax.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
I miss when technology would simply move forward without someone dramatically announcing obituaries.
But... the future refused to change.
I work for the DoD. Our brand new computers only take about 30 mins to boot up and become useable.
http://www.reverbnation.com/play_now/song_6577490
Wife's mac boots in about a minute or two, but she goes MONTHS without booting.
My XP box is trimmed of all extraneous fat, and it boots in about 1.5 minutes. Windows seldom lets me go for a day without doing something that requires a restart, so I get a lot more experience. I also don't leave the machine on 24/7. At the very least, it's booted once a day.
Funny, I recall DOS and CPM boot times in the seconds. These were with 4.77 MHz 8088's and 1 MHz Z-80s. You'd think the front end housekeeping could be done nowadays with GHz processors. I mean, come on, RAM test? Every time? Configuration check? Every time? Some of that crap seems a tad excessive.
Boot times are meaningless.
My ZX Spectrum booted in under a second.
My Gameboy would boot instantaneously unless it was for the enforced 2-3 second Nintendo logo.
My Super Nintendo booted instantaneously.
A boot time can, quite literally, be zero and there are a myriad systems available where that's true, and have been for decades. Saying that a tablet can boot "in under 10 seconds" a few decades ago would have you laughed at. Yeah, sure it's doing more but it's also taking longer than it should.
Modern boot times are really application initialisation times, not "boot" times. The more crap you let run at startup, the longer it will take.
The problem is that plain "OS" boot times now incorporate so much crap before they are usable (e.g. the Adobe Reader Speed Launcher) it's unbelievable, which is nothing to do with the system or architecture but the OS, the applications and the user. When you can literally just use the OS and have these things load in the background WITHOUT noticing a speed drop, then you have a decreased boot time.
The actual metric is from power-on to being able to execute a application particular application and having it loaded, ready and responding to input in real-time. Anything else is a load of crap.
There's nothing at all stopping me from writing an app that draws a mouse cursor immediately with in the first few hundred opcodes of execution. It doesn't mean your "boot" time is that fraction of a second because the OS isn't "usable" at that point.
So boot times are the most useless metric since BogoMIPS - but at least that had the decency to indicate its "bogosity" in the name.
Roll on the day when nothing loads until its needed, loads quickly when it is needed, and virtually nothing but a mouse interface and graphics initialisation happens before the user can interact with a fully responsive desktop.
I've never really understood the hype about booting up within 30 seconds, 10 seconds, or whatever the hell we're aiming for this time. Mind you I'm referring to personal computers either at home or at work, not servers.
Sure, people at work can get started working that much faster or people at home can fire up their lolcats bookmarks immediately but are people really in such a hurry to get plugging away that they rush in guns a blazing right when they sit down? Surely their bosses want that to happen and if you add all the boot times per year it gives you some crazy figure like a day of "wasted time" but I've never seen people so motivated to jump right into work that their boot times are affecting them. I've always generally accepted that at least the first 15 minutes is going to be a rather slow "getting in the swing of things" period where people aren't really their most productive, and booting your box isn't really throwing your productivity down the tubes too far unless you're prone to tons of system crashes during the day.
When I was using windows laptops, I would never use the suspend feature because 3 out of 5 times it wouldn't recover properly and I would be forced to reboot anyway. This was up till windows XP. I've since switched to a macbook and I can suspend/resume till my hearts content, and in the years that I've owned my macbook(s) I can count the number of times on one hand that something borked on resume. I have no idea what my boot time speed is, because I measure my uptime in weeks and months, not hours and days.
How is Windows 7? Has it finally become reliable enough that you can suspend/resume on a regular basis without the machine imploding?
Solaris 10 and 11 are still known to boot forever even in desktop incarnations.
Windows domain- check
XP - check
roaming domains check
A reboot from logged in to logged in again takes 1/2 hour!
I think the software based hard drive encryption probably has a lot to do with the deplorable boot times. Needless to say I put the laptop to sleep rather than reboot. So monthly patches are the only reason I reboot. Unfortunately I don't get notification or I might avoid a few reboots..
Thanks to hibernation, it is possible to separate these two. I rarely shut a machine down, because I either need to reboot for some kernel updates, or I need to hibernate it for transport etc. By hibernation, I mean suspending to disk, meaning complete power off. Pretty convenient for hooking up a kill-a-watt to a HTPC, for example.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I've worked (that is, helped design and ship) desktop computers (OS in ROM) that boot in about a second. Hit [reset], and a second later you're wiggling a mouse at icons.
Meh. :-)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
OSX and Windows regularly lock users out and require reboots as part of the update procedure. Well engineered OS's only require a reboot after upgrading the kernel and they don't lock users out for 10 minutes while they "apply updates".
My home PC boots Windows 7 faster than the POST/SATA boot sequence, with an SSD and ample memory. My work computer takes about two minutes to get from login to Vista desktop, another two to five minutes to clear scripts, security logins, A/V start, two different alert systems (one phased ut but active) and about a half dozen utility loads to the task bar. Plus, all our storage and apps are on the network, and we used a jury-rigged Word template system, so loading Word takes another minutes or two. Generally speaking, the first 10 minutes of my day are wasted waiting for my computer to login, and another two to three at the end of the day to verify it restarted, otherwise I'll get a nastygram from IT.
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In that case it would automatically hibernate
And I've seen a lot of machines come out of hibernation to a blank unresponsive screen due to defective drivers.
If you're running from meeting to meeting then you are just closing the lid and going, why would you even notice how much time it takes to go to sleep?
As I understand the complaint, the excessive time is between 1. closing the lid and 2. being able to safely move the laptop (and its mechanical HDD). Moving a drive with a spinning dis[ck] has been seen to scratch the medium, making it unreadable, at least on the Xbox 360.
Arrive at work and turn on corporate laptop (2 MHz Dual Core XP with whole disk encryption and gigabit LAN) if I had turned it off when I left. Scoot chair to LINUX machine in corner (same specs but not connected to corporate LAN) turn it on. Move to XP machine, ah, there is the first logon, enter username and password. Scoot over to LINUX machine which has desktop up and is waiting for my keychain password and enter it. Launch Eclipse or Chrome and glance at XP. Is the second logon there? No, wait, there it is, enter same user name and password and go back to LINUX machine to do some real work for the next 12 minutes or so while the disk on the XP thrashes. If I think of it look at the screen for the XP machine and close error message boxes and either enter passwords or close a couple more dialogs while this is going on.
Total time to be able to use the XP without delays, the cursor not where I think it is or moves in jerks and windows take many seconds to display, is about 15 minutes. If it's the day for the anti virus software to run then this takes longer and the XP machine will be really slow with lots of waiting for windows for about an hour and at the end of the scan ignore and close the window that says a virus has been detected in an Excel file in the cache and I need to call for help. (The original file, last edited in 1996, is apparently OK, though.)
IT is really earning their pay.
Nate
Even if you drop the laptop, it's unlikely to cause the very very lightweight head being kept away from the platter by a stream of high-speed air to crash into the platter and cause data loss.
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A ten-minute delay for an employee working 50 weeks a year, 5 days a week, is 2500 minutes or 41 2/3 hours of work, a 2% increase in time when the employee can be working. If the computer has a 4-year lifecycle, that's 4 weeks of work at an 8 hour day.
That time may be utilized with up to 100% efficiency depending on the habits of the worker, e.g. if the employee checks work mail or does some other routine action on the computer before working, and does not pipeline another task during the time his computer spends booting up. This is *only* factoring in boot-up delays, and if the employee has any hard-disk-limited transactions during the day.
An employee making $100K/year earns $8k during that time. An employee making $50K/year earns $4k during that time.
Assuming worse factors--a 3-year lifecycle, a 50% time use or 5 minute per day savings, and a $50K/yr employee--the extra employee time would still cost you $1.5K over the machine life cycle.
It is *easily* worth spending an extra $1K on a computer* if it will give an employee an extra five minutes a day. If the employee is paid well or by-the-hour, it is worth significantly more to do so.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Then why was the Xbox 360 scratching game discs if the console was moved while the game was running?
I am more concerned about how long it takes to get all my apllications back into the state they were in so I can pick up where I left off. This includes terminals logged in to remote machines, editing files, monitoring logs, database clients, and of course email and web browser windows. All of this is then arranged on several desktops according to tasks and projects.
These times do not really impress me. Why? I owned an A1200 with a hard disk. My Amiga A1200 booting from a hard disk boots to Workbench in under 10 seconds. The machine was manufactured in 1992, has a 68020 CPU running at 12.5MHz with 2MB RAM.
Only times when booting up is too slow is when you are recycling your computer too much - which is very harmful no matter how do you look at it. Suspend, sleep modes - use them. Really. Power off or power cycle your computer as less as possible.
Also I mostly have cared about boot time as indication that something is not right - some device is wrongly detected or broken, or some unnecessary services are running in background. I boot my computer maximum twice a day, but I do care about that don't use unnecessary services as I tend to max it out with sound recording and JOSM (OpenStreetMap Java editor) image processing.
Only place where booting times matter is mobile - and even then it is about perception - casual user would have to use suspend all the time and not to care is their system rebooted or what. It should work flawlessly.
I admit that it is very positively geeky to boost up speed of booting, as it also improves system performance overall (if it's not cheating and 50% of system is loaded in background while display shows login screen). But practicality of it is way overrated.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Why would you do such a thing?
Always on is perfectly fine, especially for a work desktop computer.
The company I used to work for was trying to mandate that employees boot up their systems before clocking in so they wouldn't have to "pay" for the time it took them to boot their systems. Insane!!!
Me personally I had a linux system that booted up in 20 seconds anyways and of course I rarely ever rebooted it to begin with so had no issues:)
Wondering just how much power Sleep mode or such modese use in actuality? Anyone have access to outlet meters or such?
I'm not kidding. Apple is being sued by a company that claims to have patented fast booting:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2390639,00.asp
Now to answer your question. I recently installed Apple's Lion which has a resume feature. when you boot it puts you right back to where you were when you turned it off. this means no more having to quit applications when you shut down!
The reason you leave your computer on now is in part because it was a chore to turn it off and it interrupted your work flow. this is no longer the case. There is very little reasons not to turn your work computer off when you leave now.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Because the xbox 360 was badly designed and built, not meant for being moved (unlike a laptop) and a DISC drive is dramatically different from a HD?
My Atari ST could do this back in the 80's. It had it's OS in ROM.
Which, as far as I can tell, seems to be that if something is brief enough, we can pretend that it no longer occurs at all. That's what she said...
I understand that English is a living language, but I object to changes arising merely from repeated errors.
If feel compelled to point out that the stability and customizabillity of Linux basically takes all the worry of booting up out SSDs or no SSDs. I founds a nice little distro called CRUX that because it comes with almost nothing pre-configured was very easy to make boot fast- once I had everything set up to my liking I was able to boot into Icewm in 10 seconds off a SATA hard drive. Furthermore the computer on for 5 months straight before the idle RAM usage climbed over 100Mb. This wasn't some ancient kernel version either, it was 2.6.36. So if you don't want to worry about boot times you have the options of either trimming your boot time or just never turning your computer off. With Linux it hardly matters. I haven't used windows for a long time but my recollection of XP was that if you left it on for more than a month or so it really slowed down and got buggy. For all I know 7 is better.
So who cares?
I hate rebooting. I have 10 virtual desktops and lots and lots of software running. If it wasn't for kernel updates, I'd never reboot unless there was a hardware driver lockup or an extended power failure. To me, boot time is irrelevant (especially with journaling file systems like ext3/ext4 where it doesn't have to fsck when I reboot after a few months).
My computer works when I'm not using it. Overnight, all kinds of backups and things take place. I can't afford to shut it down. I can't do backups while I'm working.
Windows 7 actually has an INSANELY long boot time, even on SSD. It takes at least 2 minutes for my Windows 7 install to boot until the login screen and thats means nothing because you actually have to wait for the desktop to load which takes just as long. Right now on my computer Linux boots in about 4 seconds and thats from button pressed to desktop ready.
TFS: "Computers these days can go from completely off to working within 30 seconds, and in some cases much faster."
Not true for many types of "computers." I hope this progress in technology will be felt: in a long 5 to 10 years we WILL see current technology trickle down to fix the slow boot creep that "digital" has brought to your living rooms. The magic curse is "runtime" and sometimes "java," which consumer-wise has died everywhere but in the poorly strengthened embedded world.
If you replaced your 4:3 TV with an LCD TV, you must now wait 2 to 5 seconds for every "boot", bringing back that ol' vacume tube warm-up delays that we had gotten rid of a couple decades ago. If you "upgraded" to a digital cable box, boot times take 5 to 10 minutes. Seriously, and slow channel flip times / software-assisted features are stalled by loading screens while TCP connections fetch unwanted dynamic content, but that's a different topic. Even dumb phones are slow to boot. My PS2 may boot quickly if there is no CD inside, but it always takes a noticeable 3+ second lag to load games released even 9 years ago. What on earth happened to instant on we ALREADY had, and were is the "vote with your feet" reaction that was supposed to stop embedded digital delay devolution on its tracks?
Our current progress just means that eventually, slow embedded hardware could be phased out to solve the problems. What worries me is that there's ALWAYS some new and slow technology of the decade waiting to reverse all boot-time gains.
Nice that the article summary cares to brag about a Macbook AIR and then throw in that a Windows 7 laptop is "the same". I run Win 7 on a 2 year old tower and it wakes up and goes to "usable" in 10 seconds. It might even be less than that but I still use a CRT monitor and the tube is still "warming up" by the time my desktop is ready.
It's true, in the nineties windows took a minute to load, but I just upgraded to an i5 with all the bells and whistles, and wow, can you note the progress, I have to suffer through the unskippable, five-second "DURR I'M YOUR VIDEOCARD" screen, the five-second sata adapter screen (DURRIVES DETECTED), the five-second POST screen, well, to be honest, the four seconds of black screen loading the post screen (DURRAM DETECTED, OBVIOUSLY THE USER DOESN'T KNOW SO I NEED TO TELL HIM EVEN THOUGH I NEVER WOULD HAVE BOOTED IN THE FIRST FUCKING PLACE), which is set to the lowest setting possible, 1. Yeah, there's no skippin' ANY OF THAT. I just might forget who the fuck NVIDIA, MARVELL and ASUS are between reboots.
But yeah, windows loads a *bit* faster on my SSD....
TECHNOLOGY!
I use a different approach now to what I used to do. We all know how messed up XP machines would get just from being on over a period of time. With Win7, MS added a remarkable feature called the virtual machine (yes, i know they didn't invent it, they just made it a lot easier to implement).
As a matter of course, I don't install any software on my host machine. It all goes to a VM of which I have many. My Win7 machine boots as fast as the day it was installed, which is about 15 seconds to the desktop after BIOS because it's not loading tons of crap. iTunes, TOMTOM updater, torrenting...it all sits on an expendable copy of XP in a VM. :)
My home desktop boots fully (everything loaded and into the browser homepage) in about a minute or so, including password login. It used to be around 20 seconds, not sure if it's all the updates or the HDD now being half full, I don't have much crap running.
The Ubuntu machine does it in about 20 seconds, including login and despite both being wireless and an older machine.
My work desktop takes about 10 minutes. Or an hour if it's Tuesday (weekly Norton scan). Actually that's not really true, thanks to the 512mb RAM and an old HDD, nothing ever seems to be fully loaded.
I just rebooted into safe-mode, and renamed the directories of a few certain annoying, time-consuming applications. Works like a charm.
Running Symantec antivirus kills boot times. Windows will boot up in about 10 minutes (to the point it stops disk thrashing). The antivirus then chokes the CPU at 95% for 20 more minutes. :(
My Commodore 64 boots up instantly. Has worked reliably for almost 30 years. And it's still fun. Downside: Disk drive speeds are abysmal. :-)
You're talking about DVD discs in the xbox.
The move from init.d to systemd has at least tripped the length of time it takes me to boot. That doesn't even take into account the fact that I often have to reboot several times because the fsck tried to run before the encrypted /home partition was unlocked, or the fsck ran before the now mandatory relabel was done or any number of other combinations that put the machine into a cyclical death spin. Before you used to track maybe 10 start up processes now there are close to a hundred. Trying to keep them in order when every time you upgrade they get shuffled is impossible. And because you are now longer allowed to look at your system while it is booting ( compete stupidity ) you more or less have to use the force to try and guess at what might be going on.
Systemd was a great idea with a pulse audio style implementation.
There's a difference between optical media and hard drives. I have a external DVD-RW drive that will scratch the optical disks like the Xbox if it is moved while running.
Sure, the days when I had to wait for a particular server to count through 2Gb of RAM 256K at a time at boot are gone, but in compensation, cell phones, which used to be largely instant-on, now take longer and longer to start. The worst example was a work-issued Blackberry 9630 earlier this year, running BBOS 5.x, which took an astonishing 13 minutes, 10 seconds to come to ready from a battery pull. Even my 9700 with OS6 takes over two minutes to fire up, down from five minutes when it was new with OS5.
It should be illegal to sell a phone that takes longer to start than the human brain can live without oxygen.
---------------------------------------
Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
Yep. When attached to the corporate network my company issued laptop takes near 8 minutes to boot to the windows desktop. And about 30 seconds longer than that to shut down.
There's a difference between optical media and hard drives.
Would you clarify what causes this difference in shock resistance? I've seen scratched HDD platters posted on a poster board in a college IT department several years ago (ca. 2002) in an effort to get students to take better care of their school-issued laptop computers. The circular scratches looked not unlike the photos of circular scratches on Xbox 360 game discs.
More like McAffee and login scripts.
I have two computers with similar hardware and OS at work and at home. Windows XP SP3 plus security updates, IDE disk, dual core processors of not too different performance.
My private computer at home (no virus scanner, no login scripts) boots reasonably fast. Two minutes maximum until I have a responsive desktop.
The machine at work is loaded down with McAffee, logs into a Windows domain and has a few login scripts to process. A typical start of the work day is like this:
-I boot and log in (that part is reasonably fast, it does not take much longer than on my private machine)
-I go to the coffee maker and make my first coffee of the day. Usually I take the time for the deluxe version with frothed milk. When I come back, the desktop is marginally usable, but the hard disk is still busy. I suspect a preemptive scan by McAffee, but the Task Manager shows something like 98% idle, so whatever it is hides its activity.
-About 10 minutes after booting, hard disk activity goes back to "normal" and I can actually get work done.
C - the footgun of programming languages
My desktop PC is fairly high-end (built it 18 months ago with a core i7, 8 gigs memory and a 5870) but I'm using a quite old IDE (120 gig or something) hard drive for the OS drive.
Because I don't *CARE* how long it takes to boot. Once it's up all my applications load off the WD 1TB Black. Between that and the CPU/Memory and GPU it's more than fast enough.
So while it's booting I have breakfast or take a walk or...find something else to entertain me which never seems very hard (TNG on Netflix: when am I NOT entertained?) And when I get back it's ready to go and really, really fast. Weren't we talking about 15 second boot times in 1998? Does it really matter any more?
At work I have 3 computers, an XP machine, that takes about 6 minutes to log off at night, and another 15 to be useable in the morning, thanks to roaming profiles, and security scans. The second computer is a Vista machine that takes roughly 5 minutes to log off, and until this week 25 to become useful, it was down to 5 recently, they said it had to do with our file servers or something getting borked. Finally I have a thin client that connects to a Citrix server, that's quick, but loading either of my XP desktops to a useable point takes around 5 minutes each, thankfully that doesn't change if I load both at once.
Because of the ridiculously long restart times, I normally don't log off at night. But if I need to, I wait until I can log back on, do that, and lock it while it's still in the process of doing it's thing. Oh for the love of 5-6 year refresh cycles.
At home, I use hibernation. Computer's ten years old, but ready in 20 seconds flat.
I do a lot of on-site work at different companies, and I noticed that the hibernate option is always unavailable. And corporate computers tend to be stuffed with a lot of unnecessary trash, ranging from the wrong virus scanners to those "handy utilities" that always run even when you don't need them. I don't know why, but even though the end-user often can't install anything, corporate computers tend to be completely clogged up.
One of great features of Windows 98 was supposed to be that a computer with it would boot up as fast turning on a TV set.
Would setting your computer to a static IP instead of DHCP have any meaningful affect on boot times?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
No real tech cred, just another luser. I can't even read his shit anymore.
My 2 year old work laptop is configured with an SSD, 4gb of RAM, Sophos AV, and a handful of other system tray items boots in 25 seconds to a desktop. Only 20 seconds is required when coming out of hibernation. The same machine with Windows XP and without the SSD took six minutes.
My C64 boots up near enough to instantly as makes no difference!
My DOS machine being a close second...
I only reboot once a week. I'm running XP on a Dell workstation with SATA drives. It doesn't take too long to get to the login window. But then I have to let it sit there for a few minutes before logging in. Otherwise the TCP stack apparently hasn't fired up yet and the VPN doesn't automatically connect. Plus, the lack of disk cache after booting makes it take a long time to load Thunderbird and Firefox.
The worst I ever had to deal with was an IBM RS/6000 Model F50 with a lot of SCSI cards. This was in 1998. Boot time was upwards of 30 minutes. It did these incredibly long self-tests of every card in the system. IBM didn't seem to understand that spending 5-10 minutes self-testing a SCSI card wasn't acceptable when there were a half dozen or more of those cards in the system ...
That system really messed with us. I'd come in at midnight to take the system down, and if there was any problem that required multiple boot attempts, I would be stressing about getting the system back up by 8AM. Nothing like being blasted by industrial strength air conditioning at 5AM watching the little LED numbers change over and over again. Once the system got up and running it was pretty fast (for the time), but oh my god the boot times.
I have my system set to power off at 11PM and back on at about 6-7am so I never see it boot up, and it save a tiny bit of power of my power bill.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
SSDs will fail in time, it's the way that they work. Although most original owners will not see it happen, the next owner will. This is the same for much of the storage that we are building into personal devices, they will by design end up as junk.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
I leave mine on 24/7...it just goes to sleep after 20 minutes of non use. Oh, and about the power consumption? It's a product called electricity. I use it, I pay for it.
Define "boot up".
In the organization from which I just retired, we had a standard metric for basic laptop health. Assuming the user quickly and without errors types in two logins and two passwords, the time from power-on to a "settled down and usable" desktop was 8 minutes. Once in a blue moon, we'd see someone achieve 7 minutes on a new machine, but 8 was the standard. If boot times stretched past 15 minutes, users generally knew to open and ticket and get a tune-up.
I know of about 120,000 users who would jump for joy at boot times measured in seconds instead of minutes.
You will ruin your quick boot times... as soon as you add a computer to an active directory domain and/or add security/anti-virus software.
(This applies to Macs too).
Windows is now installing updates.
Please do not unplug or turn off computer.
1 of 78 Updates completed.
Oops! Sorry boss, I'll probably get to work after lunch.
... because for 10 years now, my computers just go to sleep when I close them, and wake up instantly when I open them, and every couple of months they reboot after a core operating system update, which they do unattended. I think if you know how long your computer takes to boot, you are doing it wrong. It should boot a handful of times per year, and nobody should be watching it when it does.
I learned a trick long ago that has served me through all my Winz configs:
If you use tons of special fonts (like +1000) it lags the boot time tremendously. For some reason, RedmondOS needs to load, or at least check/verify, every single stupid font you have installed. Things you used once, like a fancy Christmas snow-letters font.
Since I keep my fonts trimmed to a dozen or so standard publishing fonts and load special-case fonts on a as-needed basis (and remove them afterwards) I've noticed a consistent improvement in WindowsBoxen.
The CD/DVD read head is kept really close to the disk, the lens also has to be able to move to change the focus, it is usually held in place by a magnetic field. A small chock can bend whatever is holding the head away from the disk and/or move the lens out of place and hit the disk.
The read/write head of a hard drive is kept much closer to the disk, but by a very fast stream of air instead of a mechanical part. The head is essentially flying over the disk. While the distance is smaller, the shock required to reduce it to zero is greater.
In addition, some laptop hard drives sense when they are being dropped, suspend all read/write operations and move the head away from the disk to the ramp that heads go to when the drive is turned off. CD/DVD drives are too slow for that.
When the head hits the disk it makes a circular scratch in both cases, since the medium is spinning and the head is stationary.
It takes BIOS at least 10 seconds to get to the point when it accesses the boot device. Any claims of anything on a traditional PC booting faster than that are bullshit -- or counted from the point when BIOS finished with its poking around.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Me, it's only when an update requires a reboot, so not even monthly these days. Touch-wood, but I haven't had a 'crash' in years!
I use Win7 on a velociraptor for my desktop, when waking from sleep mode the screens often take longer to 'wake up'.
A regular boot, is less than a minute.
It's a different issue with laptops though, using 'hibernate' mode, rather than 'sleep ' and the combination of lots of memory can still be slowish without an SSD.
The slowest boots and shutdown have got to be when using a 'remote desktop', i.e. syncing your desktop with a server over a network...
I call the death of needing to boot up!
...unless you bought a pc from Dell or some other such vendor that takes money from software companies to bundle pre-installed trial shovelware on its machines. A good deal of these programs tend to be anti-virus and desktop utilities that load at startup and slow the machine down to a crawl for a couple of minutes even after windows has loaded. Get a clean install of even Windows 98 and it doesn't take very long to get a useable desktop. XP and Windows 7 have improved boot times further. My 3 year old laptop loads XP almost as quickly as it loads Ubuntu. Even my work machine boots up in 1-2 minutes, including the login screen and loading all the antivirus stuff it has on it. Once it's on, I don't usually have to boot again until the next day.
Personally, I think it's more important to note how fast a machine (particularly mobiles) can resume from hibernation or sleep, since that is what many users do with their machines when they aren't using them.
Of course, it's always nice not to have to wait at all. When my iPhone is running low on batteries and I turn it off to conserve energy, turning it on to make a call is a real pain in the ass. From what I remember, the phone I had before also took forever to boot. In reality it only takes 30 seconds to 1 minute, but because I need to make a call right then, any wait is a pain in the ass.
or any other kind of server during work hours.Then try to imagine that the world might not really turn around your little toy's bootstrap...
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
On my rig, Win 7 Ultimate 64bit itself takes less that 7 or 6 seconds to boot. Its the BIOS POST (together with the SATA BIOS) that takes ages comparatively.
my system: Core i7, 160gb SSD + 1TB HDD, 12GB ram.
Have a nice day!
I'm on a (nearly) competely new Win7 machine (including an SSD boot drive), and bootup (to Welcome screen) is truly very fast. However, the killer is loading the user profile, which takes at least as long as booting on my home machine (into a domain with a roaming profile, hence most of the delay). At work, it gets even worse, because the machines a) usually run XP, b) definitely use HDDs, c) also have to log into a domain for authentication, and d) have a shit-ton of scripts/services that corporate IT requires (and I have worked places that just build layers of new services as new IT groups come in to impose their favorite services without cleaning off old/redundant ones)
If you are rebooting a lot, then your OS is not stable, you need a new battery or your power company is crappy. You should not have to reboot often.
-- $G
Just reboot it at then end of the day and when you come in tomorrow it has probably finished rebooting and the user can use the damn thing. I say "probably" cause it is Windows we are probably talking about here. Been patiently waiting for over 15 years for the Winblows PCs to die off but nothing out there I can replace them with. At least not here and not with this IT budget. :)
If user does not wish to reboot at the end of the day Altiris Deployment server has a nice little reasonably efficient client app that will allow you comms with the momma server and you can run a scheduled reboot sometime during the night.
Can we please try using verbs without prepositions? It might be a hoot to be able to do something without it being up, down, over or at. Did they stop teaching vocabulary in public schools?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Computers these days can go from completely off to working within 30 seconds, and in some cases much faster
30 seconds is something to be ashamed of, not brag about.
The Apple II had a boot time measured in milliseconds, and most of that was making the beep sound.
As time wore on, boot times got longer.
A thing of the past? No, long boot times are a relatively recent phenomena.
They will be with us as long as software quality is less important than time to market.
I predict they will die, but not until Moore's law stops, or at least slows down enough that we start thinking of a computer as something we won't replace until it breaks.
Only then will we care about software quality, size, and efficiency.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
My work computer still over 10 minutes to start up. Windows XP laptop. I can boot up, go the the washroom, fill my waterbottle, and come back to my desk with moments to spare before my desktop loads up and I can use the machine.
NOW what am I going to tell my sister to do when she calls with a Windows problem?
"I dunno, buy a Mac" doesn't go over well with broke relatives either :D
The latest Ubuntu (currently beta) will boot in 12 seconds on Atom (slow) hardware and Spinning Disks. That's right, not with the SSDs or better, but good old 5400rpm hard drives. Since reboots are just for updates (or else hibernate or suspend to keep your workspace), Ubuntu only asks for reboots for a few components like kernel updates, and there are services to patch a running kernel so even that doesn't need a reboot to update.
I imagine over time every component will be updatable without reboots as a standard feature and that booting up may die in that no one needs to.
Maybe because a laptop is designed to be mobile whereas stuff like an Xbox 360 usually has a warning about moving it while its on?
57.6 seconds from pushing the on button to full X desktop with dropbox synced;
on an 8 year old centrino laptop running arch linux.
That includes the time for me to type my username and password.
There was a point in time where system administrators needed to be more capable than simply being able to install Windows. What you're describing is an excellent example of extremely poor IT within the organization... I know this because my company provided computer (which I use for e-mail) is riddled with this crap from half-assed IT "professionals" as well.
Booting Windows should never take more than a minute. Or at least should never take more than a minute following POST. Login scripts are piss poor alternatives to having a single actual programmer on staff. A programmer who actually focuses on IT related tasks can make a single configurable application capable of sorting out all the citrix, antivirus and other crap involved.
Also, there's the issue of application virtualization. This is 2011, app virtualization makes a tremendous amount of things much easier and faster. In a virtualized app environment, most things don't need to start up until they are actually needed. Additionally, when coping with software getting messed up, it's much easier to sort out than if machines need to be reinstalled. Just delete the old app folder, copy over a new one.
In fact, thanks to app virtualization (App-Z isn't even that bad), boot times are almost nothing. This is because the system itself stays relatively virgin the entire time. No installed apps, no startup scripts, etc... therefore, the machine boots as fast after a year as it did the day you got the machine.
I'm sorry... this whole start up script thing really unnerves me... I actually can't believe there are still a bunch of IT losers out there that use them. It's truly pathetic.
Oh... and as for Windows domain policies... that's easily solved... make an app for that. If the stock stuff doesn't work... fix it. Adding delays is hacking the shit out of it. Adding delays doesn't fix problems, it just hides them away for a little while until the machine gets so slow again that you need to extend the delays further.
You did the math without remembering that humans at work aren't critters spinning a wheel (well, some unfortunately are just treated like that, but still...) Hell we're talking about saving 5 minutes, at the very beginning of the work shift, well I suppose that almost any employee can be able to find something productive to do for 5 minutes that doesn't involve using their workstation pc (and without considering that he may very well have a corporate smartphone or tablet already powered on...). You know like getting briefed, asking stuff, make some calls, filing some paperwork, reading some printed dcumentation, organizing their desk... hell even just staring at the loading screen while focusing and making a mental model of the things he's working on. All things that he would probably be busy doing anyway even if is computer was available ten minutes earlier.
No, I didn't--I explicitly stated an assumption about the habits of the worker and the worker's pipelining, and provided fallback math for 50% efficiency. Not exactly an exhaustive study, but not bad for a random slashdot comment.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
...then you oughta be running Linux, because boot times are half that of Windows. And I like shutting down my laptop quick.