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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?"
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!
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.
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!
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'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.
Have you seen what his work PC actually loads? His experience matches mine with the shitload of crap many multinationals put on their desktops. 10 minutes in not far fetched, even with a good SATA drive. He doesn't mean that his machine is "not booted". He's most likely logged in and he can move his mouse, but actually "doing" anything is extremely slow because the machine itself is still loading so much due to the initial login.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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.
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
I submit my punch cards to the operator and pick up the printout the next day.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
The SSD costs more than banning Facebook, which will recover an unproductive 3 hours / day.
From my experience, people will have (and need?) downtime during the day whether you get rid of some distractions or not. They will just make other things the distractions in the amount they can get away with and you won't end up with any more throughput and will have decreased morale. Take it from someone that used to study workers behavior as a profession and give the efficiency studies to the employer, we usually throw out the first couple days of data. After a couple days of the inspector checking work times and such, workers go back to their normal routine and ignore the inspector.
That is why it is better to pay for performance and goals than it is for time (where the job allows). Let them manage their own time, just get the job done when it's supposed to be done. (Again not all jobs obviously can be setup this way)
I miss when technology would simply move forward without someone dramatically announcing obituaries.
But... the future refused to change.
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.
One of the biggest things I remember noticing with the Vista RC years back was how much less time I spent waiting for random apps to start during the booting process. A big problem with XP and earlier OSes was that MS didn't have any code to start applications sequentially, which would result in them all rushing to get data off the disk at the same time.
Even now, the time it takes me to boot my much faster desktop with a much faster disk is a few minutes longer than what it takes me to boot my laptop. The main difference being that I've got XP on my desktop and 7 on my laptop.
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...