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Windows 8 To Feature 'Fast Startup Mode'

Posted by Soulskill on from the zero-to-minesweeper-in-10-seconds dept.

New story submitter CSHARP123 writes "Microsoft has posted details about a Windows 8 feature that is a hybrid between cold booting and waking up from a hibernated state. This feature is called fast startup mode. Gabe Aul, director of program management in Windows, explains: '[A]s in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk. If you’re not familiar with hibernation, we’re effectively saving the system state and memory contents to a file on disk (hiberfil.sys) and then reading that back in on resume and restoring contents back to memory. Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested).' The post contains a video as well, which shows Windows starting up in less than 10 seconds."

7 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Time to Usable by Scutter · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Can we start talking about "Time to a Usable Desktop"? My laptop boots to a login prompt in 15 seconds, but after login it's another 2-5 minutes before it's done thrashing the hard drive. There are precious few (useful) tools available to track down everything the system is doing, and even fewer to help you improve the situation.

    --

    "Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
    1. Re:Time to Usable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Doesn't really matter yet.
      There is a sweet spot between when you push the power on button to when the computer is usable.
      If it is about 5s or less then the user will stay at the computer during boot. If it is in the 10s or more the user will go and do something else that probably takes several minutes while the computer is booting and in that range it doesn't really matter if the boot time is 30s or 3 minutes.
      A 5s boot time will still make the user reluctant to use the computer while in a hurry and will cause stress and heart problems for simple things like looking up at time-table for the train and similiar things.
      Below 1s and there is not really any need to optimize it further. (Unless it is a server that gets its power on signal from the router when there is incoming communication.)

    2. Re:Time to Usable by JanneM · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Here's an idea for Ubuntu to beat Windows: Take a screenshot of the desktop when the user selects shutdown. Throw up that screenshot as the boot splash screen. Presto - Ubuntu "booting" in just a second.

      About as honest.

      --
      Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
    3. Re:Time to Usable by grimmjeeper · · Score: 1, Insightful

      for Windows Vista and better, anyway.

      ... so it works on OS X?

      ...and Linux?

  2. Just moving the problem really by dingen · · Score: 1, Insightful

    So instead of waiting for the system to boot up, you now have to wait for the system to shut down (because it is writing the files required for fast booting). What an innovation!

    --
    Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
  3. A short review of Soluto. by bmo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    OK so I tried Soluto in a VM. I was curious and downloaded it.

    Granted that a VM is not a real machine, it shouldn't make any difference in this sort of software. But it does. The VM install of Windows is pretty spare. It has only a few programs that I actually fuck around with in Windows. It takes under 10 seconds to get to login and under 5 for the desktop to appear. So it's no slouch.

    1. Soluto's a pig. Oink Oink. It will not even install if you have less than 512MB of RAM, which a lot of people do if they're still running XP (which is a huge amount of people). This means typically 256 or 384MB or 512MB with "shared graphics memory" cutting it down. I know, people should upgrade, but this isn't some sort of 3D modeling program, it's just a startup trimmer and browser fixer.

    2. It's a sloth. It's slow as molasses in January. The install is slow and the interaction is slow. And its disk footprint is huge for what it does.

    3. It /insists/ on using flashy 3D graphics calls. I know that you have to please the drooling masses somehow, but this is one of the main causes of #2. In a VM it turns the interface /unusable/. I had flashbacks of Norton in the 9x days.

    In short, this program has loads of fat that should be cut off and thrown in the fire. It should reflect what it purportedly does - speed up your machine. This is not done by adding useless frippery.

    --
    BMO

  4. Re:A short review of Soluto. Follow up. by bmo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What a passive-aggressive piece of shit.

    An animated frowny-face when I go to Install? And second guessing me?

    Fucking really?

    I'm sorry, but this is unacceptable in a utility software.

    There is a quality I see in good software. I call it 'neatness'. It's a tough quality to describe. Neat software does something useful, does it with aplomb, and has a simple, spare, self-descriptive interface that does not surprise the user in bad ways. But it's more than that. It's software that, when used, puts a smile on your face because of its elegance.

    Soluto is anything but that.

    --
    BMO