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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?"
SSDs are expensive when you're buying by the thousands and consider that, aside from boot times, they don't impact PC performance enough to justify the cost for MOST PCs.
It takes my work PC about ten minutes to get to a working desktop. Probably two minutes to actually boot to windows, three or four to get to the Windows logon (anyone who works Windows domains has learned that if you don't have some wait times built in, policies may not load and you get support calls), then another three to five after I log in for all the scripts, antivirus, citrix, and other crap to run before my desktop is fully functional.
Sure a MacBook Air can boot in under a minute. It also can't run most of what we use and costs WAY more than the average business computer.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
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.
>"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.
Has this self-check helped you in any way in the last 10 years, unless building the machine yourself? You'd think that at least the memory check would be good for something, but it isn't, otherwise we wouldn't need something like memtest. On most OEM computers, you simply get the logo of the company who made the computer... Not even the "useful", but "scary" information the computers of yonder showed you (Usually you can enable in in the BIOS to do that, but not on all machines).
Anecdote: I had this weird situation where I got a dumpster sourced laptop. It had only 256MB RAM, I played around with different sticks to see if it would boot. Booted fine, so I thought... Nice, now it has 512MB RAM, I'll install Debian... During the PXE boot install I get a big red dialog telling me that there was not enough memory. I was really "WTF!?!". Turns out that I didn't insert de DIMM deep enough and that it booted with 640K, which this particular machine had on-motherboard (which is very rare...). The OEM screen showed right, up without errors. So those self tests don't do much in the first place.
Try having a defective CPU? Won't even boot... Self test? A few beeps if you're lucky.
As a dumpster diver, I get all kinds of machines on my desk. It's always fun to find whatever failed (if something failed, often it's just a certain OS from Redmond that got heavily infected). The POST is useful to me, but not all that useful... To most end user, just a dialog "Sorry, hardware is broken" would be more than enough.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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.
Why leave it on if you're not going to use the thing for hours and hours (or, in the case of work computers, days)?
I mean, I get that it's a pain in the ass to wait the few minutes for your PC to boot, and I get that some computers must always be on as a function of what they're doing, but really, if it's not being used at all, WHY keep it on?
In the case of the individual it may not make a huge impact in energy usage versus the computer sitting idle all night, but if everyone did it I imagine that the amount of energy saved would be enormous.
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.
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.
I understand, and for situations that require the thing to be left on I have no problem with it, but a LOT of people don't leave their computers on for any reason other than "sigh...waiting for my computer to beep and boop is a pain in the ass"
Nobody likes to sit and wait for a few minutes while their computer boots (well, for anything, really, who likes waiting?) but is a few minutes waiting for boot in the morning really worth the energy cost in the thing being on all night long consuming energy for no reason at all? Hell, by the time I'm done taking my coat off, getting my morning cup of coffee, and looking through the stuff shoved under my door after I left, the thing is sitting there waiting for a login, which takes me approximately 1.3 seconds to type...so really, where am I losing all this time again?
I find it hysterical how many people are concerned with that handful of minutes waiting for a boot but can stretch a trip to the bathroom to take a piss into a 15 minute excursion and see no problem with it. Funny how that works...