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Rad Community Technical Discussion Boards (Computer Hardware + PC Software) >> PC Hardware + Software (except Cloning programs) >> Major Technical Breakthrough in Windows Boot-Times http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1244039091 Message started by Pleonasm on Jun 3rd, 2009 at 9:24am |
Title: Major Technical Breakthrough in Windows Boot-Times Post by Pleonasm on Jun 3rd, 2009 at 9:24am
Readers of this forum may be interested in the efforts of Diskeeper to improve the boot speed of Windows…
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Source: Major Technical Breakthrough in Windows Boot-Times |
Title: Re: Major Technical Breakthrough in Windows Boot-Times Post by NightOwl on Jun 3rd, 2009 at 10:09am
@ Pleonasm
As always--interesting information! But, isn't this a little bit over-the-top marketing hype?! Quote:
In my *world*--10 seconds faster being the maximum increase they were able to achieve--does not qualify as a *significant boot-time improvement*. If faster return to *up time* is needed, wouldn't using the *hibernate* feature be faster? I don't use that feature--I don't know if you can *password* protect your system when it goes into hibernate mode. Let's see--if 10 seconds is a 20% improvement, then I think we're going from 50 second boot time to 40 second boot time--is that going to change my life dramatically?!!!! Am I going to be more willing to sit at my computer waiting for the boot process to complete so that I'm *more productive* if I only have to wait 40 seconds and not 50 seconds? I could be wrong, but I would think most users are going to walk away from their system after hitting the on-button, and will waste more than that 10 seconds time before coming back and completing the boot process by entering their password, etc. Just being argumentative--I find our *instant gratification* society a bit much sometimes! |
Title: Re: Major Technical Breakthrough in Windows Boot-Times Post by Pleonasm on Jun 3rd, 2009 at 11:29am
NightOwl, yes - I agree. There seems to be a bit of "hype" in this announcement. Still, it's interesting to keep an eye on these developments.
Once the technology transitions from the "vaporware" stage to actual software, I'm sure we'll see critical assessments and thoughtful reviews appearing in the press. |
Title: Re: Major Technical Breakthrough in Windows Boot-Times Post by MrMagoo on Jun 3rd, 2009 at 6:57pm
Making Windows boot faster is an easy target for marketing. Most people feel like Windows takes far too long to boot up, including me.
Usually, it is something outside of Windows that stretches boot-up time. Many Windows Domain admins love to make your machine execute little scripts during boot up or log on, adding significantly to boot-up time. At home, malware and anti-virus are typically the culprits. Some AV clients automatically perform a scan at every boot-up - making turning the computer on a long process. Scheduling AV scans for the middle of the night, reducing the number or programs that load on startup, defragmentation, and cleaning out malware are all likely to be a much bigger improvement for most people than this diskkeeper product (although not necessarily in that order.) Windows7 supposedly boots much quicker than Vista, but I haven't tested myself. Some Linux fans have put a ton of effort into making Linux boot quicker, and their results have been impressive. I assume it is the same sort of things Microsoft tried to do with Windows7, but taken to a much larger extreme. http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/ There are also efforts to boot a Linux environment directly from BIOS, giving you essentially an instant-on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moblin http://www.coreboot.org/Welcome_to_coreboot |
Title: Re: Major Technical Breakthrough in Windows Boot-Times Post by Dan Goodell on Jun 4th, 2009 at 5:29am MrMagoo wrote on Jun 3rd, 2009 at 6:57pm:
I've got images of bare installs that I can use for comparison tests. These are the boot times* I get, in seconds, until the desktop icons show up, and until the wireless icon in the system tray changes from 'not connected' to 'connected'. WinXP Vista Win7 Time to show desktop icons 20 41 36 Time to establish wireless connection 31 52 41 These are clean installs of just the bare OS, with nothing added except appropriate drivers for the hardware. Tests were done on a 2.16-Ghz Core2 Duo laptop with 3-GB ram. Repeating the tests consistently showed times within about +/- 1 sec. Note: Each partition came from a Ghost restore, so file system fragmentation should not have any impact. Each restored OS was rebooted once before testing to make sure it had a chance to reestablish its paging file. * Boot times do not include POST time. I'm multibooting, so I started counting from the time I initiated the boot selection from the boot menu. |
Title: Re: Major Technical Breakthrough in Windows Boot-Times Post by MrMagoo on Jun 4th, 2009 at 6:10pm
Wow. Interesting comparison. Thanks for posting your numbers. So it looks like Windows did improve from Vista -> Win7 but is still a step backward from XP.
The fast booting Linux distro I linked to above went from POST to an idle desktop ready for user input in about 5 seconds on an Eee PC. Most of the changes they made were in kernel initialization. |
Title: Re: Major Technical Breakthrough in Windows Boot-Times Post by Dan Goodell on Jun 4th, 2009 at 9:35pm Yeah, XP is still my main OS because I've got it tweaked just right and I'm familiar with it. I haven't been playing with Win7 that long and haven't really put it through it's paces, but I like what I've seen so far. The UI is quite similar to Vista, but I strongly dislike Vista, so I don't think it's just the "pretty face" I'm reacting to with Win7. I still haven't figured out where Microsoft moved all the usual settings to configure things, but it feels snappy, not sluggish, seems quite stable, the UI has some nice features, and that UAC stuff isn't as intrusive as it is with Vista. I think Brian's been test-driving Win7 for awhile now, so I wonder what his thoughts are. That "linux-in-5-secs" link was interesting, but it's that "linux-in-the-bios" idea that I find most intriguing. I first heard about that a couple months ago, and think it holds enormous potential. Actually, what I think would be ideal in the future would be a bios that booted to a virtualization shell, from which the user could launch a virtual machine stored on a hard disk, flash drive, the network, et al. Rather than having to boot an OS first (Windows, linux, OS X...) and running a virtualization program (VMware, VirtualPC, Parallels...) from that OS, the bios would provide the virtualization environment directly. Imagine if everyone could carry their own "computer" on a flash drive and plug it into any hardware shell anywhere (home, work, public library, friend's house...) and have your own OS of choice, desktop, programs, and settings--all without having to worry about drivers or relying on a particular host OS. |
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