With boot up performance becoming a major purchase consideration for consumers, and even enterprises evaluating new desktop, laptop and netbook providers, Diskeeper Corporation today announced a major technical breakthrough in the field of Instant On computing.

Even with increasingly more powerful hardware, the time it takes to boot Windows operating systems has increased. While Microsoft continues to make improvements, many vendors have offered alternative solutions that allow users to boot to alternate operating systems. But what if you could boot up Windows in the same time it takes to boot an alternate system? The pioneers of increasing computer performance have made the unimaginable come true.

Diskeeper Corporation is in the final production stages of a solution to speed the boot process of Windows based operating systems. Extensive tests performed on Windows XP utilizing different hardware from a variety of manufacturers, shows significant boot-time improvements on every system tested, including cases where the boot process completes over 10 seconds faster. Tests on the Windows 7 Release Candidate demonstrated similar results. Improvements from this new technology translate into as much as 20% faster boot-times.

Manny Salinas, President of Diskeeper Corporation, noted that "we expect to offer this solution to consumers and corporations alike, but a key initiative is to make this technology available directly to computer manufacturers."

Director of Product Management, Michael Materie added that "this is far more than a unilateral consumer technology, and has tremendous appeal to the global Windows community." By offering near-immediate boot up, corporations will be able to enforce green computing policies and cut energy costs significantly without lost productivity. Materie concluded that "workstations can now be powered off at night without incurring the lost production the following business day as users power up the system and then go get coffee."

Diskeeper Corporation believes that the dramatic improvement in boot-times will provide a high-demand product differentiation to system builders. EVP of Business Strategy, Modesto Rodriguez, confirmed that "we expect to see this technology shipping from OEMs in Q3 of this year as we already have numerous household brand computer OEMs who have expressed significant interest and are moving forward."

Windows7 supposedly boots much quicker than Vista, but I haven't tested myself.