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?"

Comments

Something I do once a month...

[netsharc]

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?

Several minutes seems more likely

[Zocalo]

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... :(

Re:it's true you boys

[the real darkskye]

.. McAfee in uber paranoid mode ...

There's your problem right there.