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The Death of Booting Up

Posted by timothy on from the singularity-prequel dept.

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?"

7 of 557 comments (clear)

  1. Something I do once a month... by netsharc · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!
    1. Re:Something I do once a month... by Leebert · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why leave it on if you're not going to use the thing for hours and hours

      Because shutting down or even suspending kills TCP state, and re-logging in is a pain in the butt when you have lots of multi-factor sessions.

  2. Several minutes seems more likely by Zocalo · · Score: 4, Insightful
    It does depend on your definition of "boot time" though. Getting to the login prompt is completely different from getting to the desktop and having all of the various AV and other corporate IT management software and other sundry login scripts and apps stop thrashing the disk to the point where you can actually do something useful. The standard default for corporate login scripts seems to be to check if the corporate LAN is reachable and if so:
    1. Push down the current IT policies, even if they haven't changed since the last login.
    2. Download the latest version of any AV signatures, even if they haven't changed since the last login. (The AV is, of course, configured to do a full scan of the PC when new AV signatures are downloaded.)
    3. Start an audit of the installed software on the machine.
    4. Push down and install any outstanding software updates/upgrades.

    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!
  3. Re:it's true you boys by the+real+darkskye · · Score: 4, Insightful

    .. McAfee in uber paranoid mode ...

    There's your problem right there.

    --
    Music is everybody's possession.
    It's only publishers who think that people own it.
    Fuck Beta
    ~John Lenno
  4. Everything "dies" now. by Requiem18th · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I miss when technology would simply move forward without someone dramatically announcing obituaries.

    --
    But... the future refused to change.
  5. Re:it's true you boys by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It takes my work PC about ten minutes to get to a working desktop.

    Are you running on IDE? One good sata spin drive for $40 and you'll be booting in 2 minutes. You don't need SSD to experience normality.

    You missed the bit where he said "Work PC". That means it's so loaded with enterprise-grade crap and the need to run eight hundred boot scripts that need to download more crap over a network with a latency worthy of a satellite link that it's going to take 10-15 minutes to boot even with a liquid-nitrogen-cooled i7-EE and any kind of SSD you care to mention.

    To get a fast boot, the solution is to not run a metric buttload of crap. My Atom-based netbook (pretty much the slowest PC-grade system you can buy) gets to its XP desktop in under 20 seconds. My work machine running Win7 Enterprise, McAfee,three more pages of enterprise-grade bloat on high-end hardware takes a solid ten minutes minimum before I get a usable desktop, and then another several minutes clicking away the Adobe update dialog, the Java update dialog, the another page or so of additional crap before I can get any work done.

  6. Re:it's true you boys by omglolbah · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I love my SSD at work.

    I do software engineering for control systems and some of our software is fairly old... We're talking early 90s for the windows based configuration tools, and 70s for the actual hardware it resides on...

    The software does not cache anything. There was no ram for this when it was written... This means that if you copy a sheet of function blocks to a new controller it manually reads through about 50000 files, and a huge nasty database and checks for duplicates on every single 'tag name' for blocks and input/output blocks... Copying 2-3kb of data generates anywhere from a gig to 15 gigs of hd-access...
    Yeah, this is a cluster-fuck.

    In this specific case an SSD is a glorious piece of hardware. It cuts down the copy slowdown of this software suite by an insane amount. I used to spend maybe 10-15 hours a week just waiting for the software to move stuff from controller-to-controller but now dont have that issue at all.

    The company I work for has about 122000 people last time they bragged in a department meeting, and have recently (this summer) moved to ONLY get new machines with solid state drives in them. There will be no spinning media in laptops.

    Hell, we install SSDs in the control room clients on oil rigs even as there is a lot of vibration and heat/power consumption is a major issue there.. (The operators love us since it cuts down on the noise too :p)

    Saying SSDs are too expensive is asinine now. The cost is tiny compared to the cost of having someone sit on their arse waiting for a slow pc...