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Windows 8 To Feature 'Fast Startup Mode'
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."
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?"
in the 11 seconds or less
will they have a real reboot for when I inevitably need it
having the same bolixed kernel coming back after a necessary reboot seems like it would be an pleasant experience
This program was made possible by a grant from the Ultra-Humanite, and viewers like you.
Didn't think about that. The hibernate file doesn't have any special permissions or encryptions or something does it?
As usual the computer scientist spends about 95% of the time talking about the technical details of how this feature is achieved, and 5% talking about why the user would actually want to use it. Seems like waiting 4 minutes and 15 second for your computer to start are two pretty different options. There is definitely room for a middle ground, 30-70% less than the maximum.
Skip the loading of anything unimportant, full of bloated crapware? Sounds familiar...
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
While a welcomed improvement to the 60 seconds or so that my current machine reboots in (I don't even know really), I'm not sure this even matters. Booting has never been one of the slow downs in my computer and shaving a few seconds off a boot, which is rarely done as my machine is hardly ever turned off, is not something I even care about them improving.
But will this give corporate IT directors a reason to upgrade since they can count those few seconds as "saved" x the number of workers = profit! Even though in reality it won't make any difference.
So they have done what LISP systems have been doing for two decades or more? It's a standard thing for a LISP environment to initialize the environment and store a core image of it to speed up startup. Same thing can be done for LISP applications, effectively giving you hibernation of individual apps in a clean state.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Some of you are missing the point. It's all about perception, not a usable desktop. If the user thinks or feels like his computer boots up in 10 seconds, then he's happier. Happier customers tends to mean more $. But, yeah, I'd like to know what exactly is available to do after 10 seconds. For example, how much longer to launch a browser and see the latest feed on /.?
Back in 2008 a commenter on Matthew Garrett's blog proposed what sounds like this idea and called it "Rebootinate"
Didn't think about that. The hibernate file doesn't have any special permissions or encryptions or something does it?
It doesn't matter if the file is protected. If you can breach the kernel, and store your malware/rootkit/etc as part of the "session 0" data mentioned in the summary, then the OS will automatically save it all for you. No need to crack the file.
However, the file does provide another vector for attack.
My current Windows7 boots to login screen in about 8 seconds, and after logging in, it's about 2 seconds to useable desktop. Of course, this is on a new SF-2281 SSD, that pumps out about 511MB/sec read rate on SATA-III controller. If you want fast boot times, people these days should consider an SSD OS drive (120-240GB), and a spinning disk for everything else (data, games, photos, movies, etc). The SSD improves a lot of aspects of performance, much more than just the initial boot time. Of course, this fast-boot on an SSD should be darn near instantaneous start times - unless of course it's not possible to speed up that swirling MS windows logo on boot. (Is that the bootup time bottleneck? Heh.)
With the memory footprint of something like Windows7 64-bit these days, a partial hibernation might be a good idea since full hibernation may require writing an 8GB or larger file to disk depending on how many applications are open. If you leave everything open and then hibernate, cold-booting might be faster, especially on an SSD OS drive.
It seems that every version of Windows has promised a "Fast Boot-up Mode". I wonder if this one will actually deliver on its age old promise.
"I think you know what I'm talkin' about, Mr. President; We're gonna kill us a mummy!" - Bruce Campbell as Elvis Presley
Was more thinking of a program when asked to shutdown (not sure how windows works, but I assume there's a sigterm of some sort), writing the executable code into the file so it boots up on next load.
TuxOnIce do a pretty good job for me, takes like 10s ~ 12s. laptop specs are: core i3, sata HD and 4gb ddr3.
Your thinking of it backwards. It isn't so much that they, "figured this out". It is more of a case of, "We are stacking the cards this much higher".
They didn't really figure out anything new - it's more like they're forcing a half hibernate on people who'd usually just shut down or reboot.
For those of us who already use the available sleep/standby states or hibernate, the difference will be unnoticeable, because the reboots we perform (i.e. after software or driver installation, or after Windows updates) will probably still require the full shutdown we've come to know and loathe. :(
Actually, faster than hibernate, slower than sleep/wake (without the power trickle requirements). Unlike either, you don't keep a lot of application states.
Faster than a standard start from shut down.
For people that don't hibernate/sleep their systems, it will probably be nice.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
If you read the article, the hybrid booting is only part of the upgrade.
It’s faster because resuming the hibernated system session is comparatively less work than doing a full system initialization, but it’s also faster because we added a new multi-phase resume capability, which is able to use all of the cores in a multi-core system in parallel, to split the work of reading from the hiberfile and decompressing the contents. For those of you who prefer hibernating, this also results in faster resumes from hibernate as well.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
This makes me think that the universal fix-all solution to Windows problems - rebooting - will cease to work!
Another feature looking a lot like the boost feature on old 486 tower when it had the boost option, who was stupid enough to leave it at slow?
DOS didn't have gettimeofday(), games timing was base on cpu speed. I remember taking 'turbo' off to slow down a older games that was running too fast, or slow down a difficult game...
But the same question can be asked today. If your cpu is know to be overclockable and stable, who is stupid enough to leave it at slow? Even today, there is reason to leave it at slow. More speed is not always the solution, sometime less speed is better and some other time less heat is better...
Turning off the turbo button was for the sake of games that expected to run on a slower cpu.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
That's so strange that people aren't using hibernate. That's mostly all I ever do. I still know some people who think that hibernate will draw battery power and don't use it. I also notice that it's the default button in the Windows 7 start menu, when really hibernate should be the default. Perhaps if the UI explained it better that hibernate wouldn't draw any power more people would use it. I never want a "fresh state", generally the only thing forcing me to lose my user session state is patch Tuesday.
If you've got THAT much access to the system, you probably don't need to do anything fancy to keep it there. Besides, if the user does a restart, it'll wipe the hibernate file anyway.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
The file is erased and rewritten after everything outside of ring 0 has been terminated. So the only way to infect the hyberfil.sys would be have ring 0 write the infected file.
"For people that don't hibernate/sleep their systems, it will probably be nice."
Of course - still sucks for the rest of us though :p
I was hoping for an *actual* speed-up in the full boot process :(
So,, they are actually thinking of imitating MAC
No, OSX doesnt' do anything like this. It just boots fast. No need to save the last boot and resume like this.
And for reference, a full resume from hibernate on my Mac takes about 8 seconds, faster than a windows quick boot.
Another feature looking a lot like the boost feature on old 486 tower when it had the boost option, who was stupid enough to leave it at slow?
Anyone who had a reason to? So basically anyone who used an app that expected a specific CPU speed rather than looking at a real time clock or something like that to figure out how to do things at the proper speed. During that time, most things ran on bear hardware and assumed they had full CPU, so they could do things based on CPU timing. When the CPU timing suddenly changed, everything that had any sort of video or audio was horribly broken.
The turbo button turned that off so things would run slower, more like the program was expecting. LOTS of people used it, you were just too busy putting your hands down your diapers to notice or remember.
Way to totally not have any clue what you're talking about, go back to middle school and shut your pie hole.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Also results in faster resumes from hibernate as well... at least in systems which are CPU-limited (as opposed to IO-limited) when coming out of hibernate.
Those with SSDs are on the safe side, I suppose.
The biggest problem I have when running Windows, especially in a corporate environment, is all of the crapware that doesn't start until I log in. Those are the programs that decide to do massive tasks as soon as they're started. They bog down the network connection and thrash the hard drive doing their startup scans. They make the desktop completely unusable for significant lengths of time after login.
I suppose the fast boot to a login screen is useful. I'm able to get to the login screen quickly and log in. Then I can go get my coffee and read the paper while the startup applications take forever to do whatever it is they are doing. But it still doesn't solve the core problem of having a computer that is up and useful to the end user in a reasonable amount of time.
Now, it should be obvious that the blame here is not entirely on Microsoft. They have no control over what crap the end user (or corporate IT monkeys) install on the desktop. They can't control what gets started up when the user logs in. Microsoft has no way to prevent an idiot from writing an anti-virus package that does a complete system scan (that bogs down the entire system while it's running) when it is first started by the user. There's nothing stopping a startup program from waiting for a slow network connection to time out, causing the entire startup process to basically hang. There's nothing Microsoft can do to prevent a program to rebuild it's entire search index at startup, thrashing the disk to the point where the entire system is unresponsive while it's running.
But Microsoft is not entirely blameless either. The root of the problem was the decision to make the console the central focus of operation.There is absolutely no reason why so much of the software has to start up as soon as the user logs in. There is no reason why it cannot be tied to the startup of the computer. And if that software was tied to computer startup there would be no reason it could not be identified for hibernation just like the kernel, resulting in not only a faster boot time but a faster time to actual usefulness of the desktop.
My Samsung Chromebook has REALLY fast startup mode. All the time.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
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.
When I was young my dad and I built a go-kart that used the power train straight out of my grandmother's electric wheelchair. It was fast and looked cool and for a time I felt like the Alain Prost of my entire neighborhood. There was one small problem though... my grandmother was still using her wheelchair at the time. So when she wanted to go out, we would put the battery and motor back in the wheelchair and when I wanted to use the kart we would swap it back. It took about twenty minutes and since she only went out once or twice a week, it wasn't too much of a hassle (for me at least.) It is at this point in the story that my mother pointed out something so ridiculously obvious that it would probably baffle, disorient and possibly even permanently educate Microsoft kernel developers... you know who you are... you have been warned...
My dad, being an enthusiastic amateur engineer improved the swap out time by mounting the whole assembly to a bracket that we could take out of one and bolt into the other in under ten minutes. I remember him and me being excessively proud of this rapid start up time. But then my mother dropped a bombshell that changed the face of go-kart engineering in our household forever. She suggested that we use the DC motor and battery pack from the Flymo lawnmower that sat gathering dust in the garden shed because my Dad hated using it. The mower motor and battery were both lighter and with a bit of gearing, the kart was faster than ever. I was happy, granny was happy, dad was happy and the startup time was reduced from ten minutes to zero seconds.
It's not that users can't hibernate when they "shut down" for the day. It's that the common solution for solving so many problems in Windows is a reboot at least once a week. Users are so accustomed to this that they just shut down out of habit.
DOS didn't have gettimeofday(), games timing was base on cpu speed. I remember taking 'turbo' off to slow down a older games that was running too fast, or slow down a difficult game...
I can't speak to the specific function (after all it's been 16 years already), but there were certainly more specific timers to be had in DOS than the CPU speed. The turbo button was primarily on the XTs running at 8 MHz to reduce them to the IBM standard of 4.77 MHz. When IBM XTs all ran at 4.77 MHz the use of loop based timing was common, Frogger comes to mind. By the time AT computers were common place loop based timing was mostly going the way of the dinosaur as it became evident that programs would be run on different speed machines.
However, one place I worked had to keep buying pallets of 386 motherboards whenever they could even after 2000 because they ran their older data capture platform with loop based timers. Fortunately for the platform I worked on they hired some real programmers who knew better.
Sig is on vacation
Windows XP can wake up from hibernation in that time, and then your computer is pretty much directly usable.
But Windows 8 will have to still load the user session - so you get less functionality, in more time. Hip hip.
Not necessarily. Annoyingly, they almost glance over this point, but if we read it carefully -
which is able to use all of the cores in a multi-core system in parallel, to split the work of reading from the hiberfile and decompressing the contents.
This sounds more to me like they've implemented a sort of FIFO system that allows the contents of the file to be decompressed and loaded as it's still being read from disk. It also implies (but doesn't directly state) that the operation is CPU bound, even on typical mechanical hard drives. I'd believe this, as even a cheap, slow mechanical HDD is capable of read speeds of 50-80Mb/s, which probably takes longer than 1s for a single core CPU to decompress, parse and load.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
It is irrelevant to the hibernate/sleep users, because those processes are almost completely hardware bottlenecked dependent.
So, what you are saying, is it sucks for people who are dealing with hardware bottlenecked options, that the software won't fix it???
You should be looking for someone other than an OS vendor to fix that issue.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
They're doing that too in the form of intializing devices in parallel.
How about a fast shut down mode like I have with my Mac? Also, can we kill the damn install updates on shutdown "feature"?
Is decompressing data that much work? I'd assume modern CPUs (say, starting from Athlon X2 or Core Duo) are more than capable of handling the amount of data a hard drive can pump out sequentially... hell, these are processors that benchmark at 100MB/s+ for encrypting AES. Shouldn't reading and decompressing the page file be much less CPU-bound?
No no, you misunderstand - my devices sleep and hibernate just fine. It's just that I was hoping for improvements in the time it takes to perform a full reboot, like after Windows Updates or driver installation... :)
Sounds good - but how big is the real-world performance gain? ;)
"Easier And Faster! Your Productivity Will Double!"
The same line they've trotted out with Windows 95 and every version since.
Would it kill them to get some new copy or are they just going to keep regurgitating the same crap every release and watch their OEM monopoly on new computer installs sell it without any effort whatsoever ?
I bought my first Mac 10 years ago now and have been using Mac laptops ever since. All this time I just close the lid and it goes to sleep and when I open the lid it's there waiting for me to type my password in to unlock it.
When you close the lid on OS X it turns off the screen, does a sync(), and starts hibernating remaining anonymous pages to disk. When you open again it resumes the in-memory state. If you let it sleep long enough for the battery to fully drain (I'd guess in a week or two) it will resume from the checkpointed state on disk.
I rarely reboot my 2008 Mac Pro either, I always have a lot of state - multiple VMs etc - up and running so constantly rebooting it would be ridiculously tedious. Every few months it gets rebooted due to a software update, the rest of the time I just put it to sleep (cmd-opt-eject) when not using it. It spins down and puts my external raid unit to sleep as well.
IMO more benchmarks should measure user-experience response. For instance, the time from when you open a laptop to when it's connected to a local wifi network and ready to use. I'd guess that's 2-3 seconds for a modern MacBook Pro. Maybe 10 seconds if allowed to completely drain, but that depends on memory size and how much it had to checkpoint. On my Mac Pro the slowest factor is actually the two Dell WFP3008 displays I use as my main desktop; they take about 7 seconds to come on from DisplayPort wake. (My old 24" Apple Cinema display from 2004 comes on immediately though, but it's over on a different table and I usually put VMs on it full screen with a separate keyboard and mouse. Ubuntu, CentOS, WinXP, or Win7 depending on what I'm doing.)
Seems to me that the file is written only after all user applications have shut down and you're left with only ring 0 operation. Then when you start up, the entire file is loaded before ring 0 starts any user space applications. I'm pretty sure the operating system won't even keep a copy around once the boot process is over, and even if they did they'll overwrite whatever you do to it. So in order to manipulate the file, the malware has to have access to ring 0 already. And if that's the case, I think you have more important problems to worry about.
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
A well-made rootkit will be there after a cold reboot as well.
/* No Comment */
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
Ooooh, deja vu! It'll turn out that it starts up faster because it does a lot of the work during shutdown to prepare for the fast startup, just as windows does now, only (probably) worse. And so when I go to the meeting my laptop will turn on fairly quickly but at the conclusion of the meeting it'll take forever to turn off. Until I figure out where in a plethora of wizards and dialog boxes is the checkmark to turn off the feature. Just as I had to do with my current laptop. It'll be a managerial line item to say "yes we have fast turn-on just like Apple", but will be simply a rebranding of the current hibernate technique which is the reason for that embarrassing 5 or 10 minutes at the end of meetings while we all wait for our laptops to prepare for the next "instant on".
Ok, got that one. It'll be a mandatory "disable", like Superfetch in Windows 7.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
That much thrashing indicates something is wrong and/or you have too little RAM.
It could be swapping, but it could also be seeking like crazy, especially on a slow laptop hard drive.
I'd like to see a way to buy a cheap amount of SSD ( ~= RAM size on mobo, SATA 6Gbps even) and dedicate that to hibernate activities. If I hibernate my laptop, nearly all the wake-up time is reading the memory image from disk.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I guess that depends on how much it's compressed and what it's compressed with. Not to mention the other operations the CPU must perform to load that data into memory. I'm sure it'd be I/O bound if you were just bltting the whole pagefile back to memory, but there's probably a bit more to it than that. I couldn't possibly say, though, it's certainly not a topic I know a great deal about.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Hopefully this will be better then the fast shut down mode (a.k.a. "blue screen of death") that Microsoft has developed and deployed already.
By the way, did they ever get a patent on the blue screen of death? If not, I'm sure there's a market in there somewhere!
I have to agree. It must be more difficult than I think to come up with a algorithm that maintains a semi-active "hiberfile.sys" while the OS is running. Something like an "idle" task that copies parts of RAM to disk so that when the hibernate button is pressed, there is less writing to disk that needs to be done. (Although I think they have something like that already set up, if you have some flash ram dedicated to one of those turbo-cache modes.)
"I'm sure it'd be I/O bound if you were just bltting the whole pagefile back to memory, but there's probably a bit more to it than that."
Why would there be more to it? When you wake from standby, nothing much happens at all, and the stuff in memory afte rstandby is likely to be the same as what's written back in when waking from hibernate...
I'm out of my depth here too, so this is just speculation on my part :)
Everyone will want it!
This sounds like an interesting vector for injecting code into the running kernel. Shut down; remove disk; edit hiberfil.sys; reinstall disk; restart.
I sure as **** hope there's a good quality digital signature on that file! As they're talking about speed, it doesn't seem like a huge probability.
Take off every 'sig' !!
Amazing that after 30 years of Windows a fast bootup is considered something to get giddy about. There's even a stupid as hell commercial for it at the movie theaters.
With Windows, that happens about once a month, and honestly, usually doesn't take that long unless your IT group has seriously fucked up.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
*sigh* All this will mean is an even longer shutdown.
Even before this new 'feature' gets added, WTF is all the work that windows is doing during shutdown?
Surely all it really needs to do is kill everything that isn't actively writing to disk.
which is able to use all of the cores in a multi-core system in parallel, to split the work of reading from the hiberfile and decompressing the contents.
This also implies that MS is compressing the data. I'm not as familiar with Windows 7, but I'm fairly sure that XP does not compress hiberfil.sys...it's always as big as RAM.
I hadn't heard a change for Vista or 7, and I imagine writing a compressed file would slow down hibernation a lot, so you might win on resume, but you'd pay on the other end.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
DOS didn't have gettimeofday()
You didn't need gettimeofday() in DOS, because you could just use "in al, 40h" to directly read the (14.31818 / 12) MHz timer.
Not really, think about penetration tests or bad guy walking by while your laptop is "hibernating". "boot to USB", infect hibernate file, walk away.
And depending on how you restart, it won't wipe the hibernate file.
or worse yet, it writes to some sectors of the hidden partition that is not in use... and then just hook to it in the hibernate image.
will probably still require the full shutdown we've come to know and loathe. :(
Oh noes, a whole minute! Maybe two on some computers!
In b4 low UID Slashdotters talking about computers they had to start with a crank shaft.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Or buy a more powerful computer.
There's nothing Windows can do to help you if you choose to have a million things start up on login. Those programs have to be loaded off your disk and that is that. It has no magic voodoo to speed anything up.
So part of it is just not loading so much on startup. That will take some time, no matter what. Another part is making sure you have enough RAM. If the system has to start paging out while it is loading. That really slows shit down.
Ultimately, if you want to have a bunch of stuff load, have a lot of RAM and an SSD. That'll do the trick. It is about 5 seconds on my system from login to done. I load a ton of stuff too. Off the top of my head I have Steam, Origin, Impulse, Spectraview, NOD32, and Live Messenger all start, and I probably forgot one or two.
Seriously, your problems there sound 100% the fault of incompetent IT, not Windows (I say this as an IT guy). If your system runs a virus scan on login that is fucking retarded. There is NO reason to do such a thing. If they want to run a regular full scan (something I am not convinced is useful with on access scanning) it should be done at night when nobody is around.
There's nothing Windows, or any other OS, can do to fix it. When you have something hitting your disk heavy it will slow down since disks aren't good at random access.
so you mean to say your mac behaves in the exact same fucking way every windows system has done since xp?
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Do you have a better recommendation for software which does what Bootvis did before it was discontinued ages ago? And includes a wiki-style database of apps and what the recommended setting is for them? And that is both free, and free for commercial use?
No? Oh, ok then. Im sure I can just recommend to my parents or friends that they fire up Autoruns-- Ill just warn them to be careful not to do anything that will absolutely hose the system.
Myself, I was impressed by the program, because it allowed startup editing in a way that even non-tech literate folks could understand, while not allowing them to do anything super terrible to their machine (like disabling those system drivers-- GP should have his head checked if he thinks a "general user" utility should allow access to those). It also has support for at least IE, Firefox, and Chrome, for disabling plugins-- again, in a way that the average joe could use, without needing to understand "about:plugins", and "tools -->extensions --> plugins".
I think most of the people complaining about Soluto are folks who are upset that its not another Sysinternals Autoruns, which is fine, because we dont need another one of those. This is meant to be used by folks who DONT know what all the various windows services are and which are safe to disable. I think its a fine piece of software, and nowhere near as bloated as is being implied (50mb of RAM at worst). And as for disk space, are you REALLY complaining that it uses 33MB of disk space on install? Oh the horror. And its startup time!! A terrible ~1 second! Oh noes!
I really hope you dont do any support for friends and family, because it sounds like youre really out of touch.
I'd say it depends on the compression, and how fast you can compress.
If you use one of the newer processors that has the AES instruction set and take advantage of that, you could easily compress faster than you can write to disk. With a 2 to 1 compression ratio, you've theoretically doubled how fast you can hibernate.
wtf?? have i gone insane or did an ms blog just use html5 video tag instead of flash or silverlight?
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
My Mac can full reboot in about 45 seconds. Hibernate mode is "hit space button, sneeze, ah I'm back." Whatever, no one here cares, I'm just like taking jabs at Windows since I spend way to much time fixing them at work.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
There was talk of something like this a while ago.
I think it's great - sure it would be nice if the machine could genuinely re-boot from cold start to desktop shorter but this is the next best thing.
Our machines have turned off automatically on shutdown for years, so I am going to walk away when I set my machine to shut down. If that means it takes longer but next boot up is significantly shorter, definitely not a problem with me. That's just clever design as far as I'm concerned, regardless of 'cheating' or not.
I wish I could find the article but basically Apple does clever stuff like this to make things seem quicker. I've heard that when you switch between tasks, it pulls up a screenshot which it took the last time you used that app. It displays this quickly and then while your eyes are looking for what to press, it's actually still loading the real application back into memory. It's simple and effective at making things seem quicker than they are -again cheating but ultimately a good user experience.
I laugh at these mortals who have to reboot!
We are in the customer service business. Our job is to facilitate users getting the work they need done. It must be done safely, legally, and all that, you don't get to run around and do as you please, but we work with people. We don't say no unless there's a good reason and generally we don't say no at all, we just say "No you can't do that, but here's an alternative." For example we won't allow FTP to be used because it is insecure, but we'll get you setup with SFTP (SSH) no problem.
If your IT department isn't like that, that sucks. However don't then go and get mad at MS or want them to fix it. They can't make Windows magically handle a mandatory on-login virus scan faster. That can only be done with hardware that is better at handling random access, namely an SSD. Even then it'll slow things down, the real answer is off-hours scanning, or the real real answer is don't perform full scans on a schedule there is no reason.
I use a laptop, and work from home several days a week, especially the days I have early morning phone calls (i.e. mid-morning phone calls on the East Coast, which is not where I live :-) Overnight software installations that trigger reboots mean that occasionally I get downstairs and find that my machine has rebooted, so I have to log in, restart my VPN, restart Outlook, restart my browser, figure out what documents I had open and restart them, and it's at least 5 minutes before I'm able to dial in to a phone call, and more like 10 minutes before I'm ready to work.
And this new "fast startup mode" that doesn't save my sessions isn't going to help that.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I used to use Hibernate fairly often with my laptop. But then Corporate IT installed Checkpoint's Full Disk Encryption feature, which disables Hibernate for some reason. Does this new version of hibernate have the same limitations?
I only use full reboot for three reasons - either I've installed some new software that needs it (usually Microsoft Patch Tuesday, or occasionally other software that insists on it), or else I've had my laptop unplugged for long enough that Sleep Mode has failed or gotten hosed(it used to go into Hibernate if the battery got low enough, but it can't do that any more), or occasionally I'll plug the laptop into an external monitor and it can't figure out what it's doing with video (sometimes an extra Sleep/wakeup fixes that.)
This new feature is helpful if I've shut the machine down because of battery, but otherwise I really do need a full shutdown.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Msconfig is not exactly difficult to understand.
The only reason people don't use it more often is that they don't know about it.
It does the job.
It doesn't give you any crap about doing its job.
Therefore I consider this good software. I consider it far better than a glitzed up bells and whistles replacement for msconfig.
--
BMO
There's nothing really new here. This seems to be no different from logging out and then doing a hibernate. It's probably because users don't understand hibernate that they are able to pass this off as fast boot. If users were in the habit of hibernating it would make no difference. They should be announcing faster hibernate not fast startup. This fast startup will not help with restarting for software updates or to install new hardware.
Then use msconfig, and leave Soluto to people who need it.
It might surprise you, but some people actually don't know what BOOT.INI and WIN.INI and SYSTEM.INI mean. Some people don't know the difference between startup items and system services.
If you do, STFU and stop wasting everyone's time, including yours, complaining about something that can seriously help other people. I have to fight against your kind day in and day out, just to let me design software so that our users might actually want to use it.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Other than Windows, is there any other OS that people actually have to reboot every couple of weeks? I forget when I last had to reboot the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on. Probably a couple of months back. Same with my company issue Linux Thinkpad. Fix the motherfucking reboots. I don't care how long it takes to boot if I only reboot it once in a couple of months.
Why has it always been so slow to log on to a domain in Windows? Even in 7, it can still sit there for minutes. If it was implemented in a sane manner, I bet you could transmit and process a lot of information in mere 10 seconds, even if it included the credentials, network drive mappings, policies and some scripting.
Grats, that breaks a lot of things.
For instance: Drivers arent listed, and some drivers (antivirus, web filtering, etc) REQUIRE certain services to be running in order for things to work right. For example, Bluecoat labs web filter (k9) will simply end up blocking all of your internet access if you try to disable it that way (you need to fix the winsock stack, and remove the driver). Or some versions of Norton will simply end up bluescreening you if you do that.
So if you follow your plan, and it ends up bluescreening the person's laptop, what then? "Whoops, sorry, guess its time to reformat"?
Or what happens when you end up disabling their WiFi manager, and the next day they realize their laptop wont autoconnect to wifi, and they dont know the passwords? "whoops, i guess you should know all the wifi passwords by heart"?
Or when you end up disabling their Cisco VPN service, and now the GUI part simply doesnt launch before login, which is a requirement for connecting to their office network? "Oh well, at least your laptop is faster"?
Once again, it sounds like youre out of touch. MSConfig disable all is a shotgun approach that works some of the time, but you usually end up disabling some crap they actually WANTED. Why havent you heard about it? Probably because they now think A) they dont want to keep bothering you about it and B) you sort of made it worse and they feel bad telling you that.
The fact that you havent run windows on your boxes for 10 years is maybe an indicator that you shouldnt be pretending you ARENT out of touch, either. Maybe you should consider using it occasionally rather than assuming that you need to make all windows boxes resemble your version of Zen computing-- some users actually LIKE google toolbar or whatever.
MSConfig is a hammer that breaks a lot of things, and shouldnt be used the way people are using it. It is possible to leave a computer unbootable by disabling services that AV relies upon for example-- see my post above.
And MSConfig does NOTHING to tell you how long each service takes to load, which is what bootvis and soluto both do. For example, I had Eraser on my laptop, and found out that that service takes 15 seconds to load. I sort of wanted the program, but not that badly, so out it went. MSConfig wouldnt have given me that info, and I dont think bootvis works on Win7 x64.
If you want a replacement for msconfig, you should REALLY be looking at sysinternals Autoruns, which does way way more than MSConfig (drivers, winsock stack, services, startup list, codecs, etc).
Honestly, MSConfig is a poor piece of software to use in the way you are using it for a large number of reasons:
* It will pop up a scary warning the next time that user boots
* A lot of MS Articles ask you to switch to "minimal startup" for testing, and then set it back to normal. Any user following these instructions would undo all your work.
* It assumes that there are no vital 3rd party dependencies that will be broken by "disable all"
* It doesnt give you any way to check the digital signature on windows programs, which might lead to you leaving "Svchost.exe" (an infected copy) enabled
* And contrary to your belief, a lot of the time, no, it doesnt do the job, and will easily miss the commonest of viruses.
Its utility is mainly in troubleshooting, and not much else.
I know about msconfig, and I would recommend Soluto above it for 50% of the cases, and sysinternals Autoruns for the other 50% (especially since it can be downloaded straight from http://live.sysinternals.com/
Nice to see the PC world is slowly catching up with the Amiga and only 15 years behind on this one. I seem to remember approx 8 sec boot time from cold with my old 0.5GB HD. http://aminet.net/package/util/boot/FastBootV1_0 Where are my datatypes and arexx ports? I am still waiting for those.