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290 Comments
- jehan60188, on 11/05/2008, -3/+91listen man, when you have nothing better to do but restart your computer all day, short boot times make all the difference between getting 50+ boots per hour, and NOT breaking personal records...
- DeathRay2K, on 11/05/2008, -3/+91Well, Microsoft says that they worked on parallelizing driver and service loading, so more cores makes for faster boot times now.
- Tishiablo, on 11/05/2008, -13/+67Hmm.. WIndows Vista boots faster than XP did for me.
- fuzzynyanko, on 11/05/2008, -1/+51Windows was said to have, what, billions of lines of code? There's a lot of possibilities to optimize and streamline things.
- inactive, on 11/05/2008, -7/+56Vista doesn't crash, neither does XP.
Why would 7? - scabbers, on 11/05/2008, -9/+57I wish I understood why boot times are such a big deal to some people.
- MuffinFlavored, on 11/04/2008, -4/+51What is the booting process of an operating system?
1. Read the Master Boot Record (MBR)
2. Execute the code read
What does that code do?
1. Load the kernel
2. Load device drivers
I wish I knew why Windows 7 boots faster than Windows Vista. - medj, on 11/05/2008, -10/+53Windows 7 will kick Vista's ass
- balliamo, on 11/05/2008, -4/+37same here actually
- gbjxc, on 11/05/2008, -0/+29"The only way to truly compare boot-up times between operating systems is to try them out on the same exact hardware, and as of today I'm triple-booting XP, Vista, and the Windows 7 Preview on a newly-built PC."
- lumpking69, on 11/05/2008, -8/+37I'm sick of hearing about the stupid taskbar, good to see something different! I am still waiting for some gaming benchmarks though :-D Thanks.
- fuxxx, on 11/05/2008, -1/+28You sound excited.
- inactive, on 11/05/2008, -10/+35We already have stand by mode. Who gives a damn about boot times?
- Arkz, on 11/05/2008, -2/+24if your machine is crashing you have a hardware conflict or driver issue, that or a program you're using has some bad bug, windows doesn't just crash for no reason
- Ryouken, on 11/05/2008, -13/+33As if thats saying much...
- drewbe121212, on 11/05/2008, -1/+19Hmm. I idle at 1-2%... less pr0n, my friend.
- j3ff86, on 11/05/2008, -0/+17S3 standby mode... look it up.
- Akairenn, on 11/05/2008, -1/+18I'm still trying to figure that out myself.
Vista's hibernate/sleep functionality works perfectly. Same with OS X. I can only imagine that it's disgruntled Linux geeks trying to come up with some reason as to why we should use Linux on a desktop. :p - dse78759, on 11/05/2008, -7/+22The boot time is about as important as the color of the box it came in.
But if I have to REBOOT this pile of drek even once more per week than the previous version, it is an abject failure. - NinjaBoy, on 11/05/2008, -10/+24Dude the pc takes less than 30 seconds to boot no mater what os was on it. Are you so busy that 10 seconds really matters? And if so what the ***** are you doing on digg wasting hours?
- kelchm, on 11/05/2008, -0/+14Its a good indication of the kind of low level refinements that have been made.
- RoboRay, on 11/05/2008, -1/+15There's this new concept you should read up about called "hibernation."
- MavRevMatt, on 11/05/2008, -1/+15Hibernate is even better if you're really wanting to save on energy consumption.
- roxgod666, on 11/05/2008, -2/+15Steve Jobs said iPhone 3g would be 3x faster than the original and we all know how that turned out...
- inactive, on 11/05/2008, -3/+15Lots of FUD already, lots more to come from our astute Diggers.
- thePTS, on 11/05/2008, -1/+13In a few years, we will use hibernation snapshots to boot off SSDs anyway.. shouldn't take more than 10 secs to boot up.
Everyone who was there when Windows 3.1 got MS growing, knows that the startup times have always been ridicoulusly long.
Shouldn't come as much of a surprise they have managed to improve it slightly. - inactive, on 11/05/2008, -1/+13My Ubuntu 8.10 boots up faster too. No kidding. I've got a duel booting machine with Vista and Ubuntu 8.10 and Ubuntu is twice as friggin' fast.
- brownr21, on 11/05/2008, -4/+16os x blows.
- scoot2006, on 11/05/2008, -6/+17Dugg for use (especially since it's proper use) of "parallelizing"
- Schmich, on 11/05/2008, -0/+11Whichever one teaches you the alphabet properly.
- BlackKnight6, on 11/05/2008, -3/+14Guess you have alot of background apps installed, its not vista taking the cpu cycles, its other programs you have installed. Just gotta do some clean up. I'm idling 0-5% with Live messenger, Trillian, speedfan, AVG (though AVG is basically complete disabled, I use it just to scan stuff I think might be fishy, no real-time protection running) and IE7 and Chrome.
Vista bashing=old and done... - PullingTeeth, on 11/05/2008, -5/+16No, more cores increase the number of items that can start in tandem, so the more that can be done on one core, the more that can be done on all cores, and thus reduces the total time taken since the tasks are shared.
- mtbterain, on 11/05/2008, -8/+19OS streamlining
during booting it loads a lot of code, the faster it is, the more efficient the code is set up to be loaded - Tishiablo, on 11/05/2008, -3/+13Nah, I'm not.
A fresh install of XP after drivers are installed takes about 6-8 scrolls on the boot + the time it takes to load my desktop.
On Vista, it never scrolls more than 4 times, and the desktop is pretty much loaded within a second. - Snarfy, on 11/05/2008, -8/+18But when the logon screen is displayed is it really booted or are there a 100+ services still loading/waiting to load? If windows loads so fast why is it another 30-60 seconds from the time I login to the time I can surf the web, open word, or do anything?! Sure it boots faster as long as you change the definition of boot.
- cbreaker, on 11/05/2008, -3/+13That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
You're actually trying to say that if the system boots faster, it's because the code is better, and that means the system itself will be faster?
That's a huge stretch, man. - phrstbrn, on 11/05/2008, -2/+12@PullingTeeth
Not really. More cores/processors allow more lines of execution to be run at the same time, but don't prevent you from starting up multiple items "in tandem".
Any multitasking operating system (almost any modern OS that's less than 20 years old) can do what you described on a single core. Only one line of execution can be run at the same time, however.
Since most boot tasks are I/O related (waiting for disk, waiting for video card, waiting for network card, waiting for sound, etc) and require extremely minimal CPU usage, more cores isn't going to help. However, the ability for the bootloader to basically thread or background all those driver initialization sequences will greatly increase boot times, with one or many cores. I would say that having multiple cores won't really help in this aspect.
Even when your programs start loading, you still won't notice a difference, since most of the time your programs are probably waiting for the hard drive to finish reading something off the disk (the hard drive is the bottleneck, not the processor).
Once all your programs are loaded, and you're ready to start doing work (your computer is no longer booting), then yeah, multiple cores will help a LOT. But during bootup, it's not going to help all that much.
Some developers have toyed with this kind of thing on Linux, and have gotten their distro to boot from power off state to full desktop, with CPU and hard drive idle in less than 10 seconds. Moving to a solid state drive (faster read times) they were able to get boot time down to 5 seconds. Granted, this was using Xfce window manager, not Gnome or KDE, so you can probably add 5 seconds if you want full Gnome or KDE. My computer running Win XP takes 10-15 seconds before the login prompt, and another 20-30 seconds before my desktop finishes loading and I can no longer hear my hard drive thrashing. (so let's just say 40 seconds total). And I consider my computer to be pretty lean. These guys did the same thing in 1/4 the time (comparing apples and oranges, I know, point is it's possible).
Link: http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/
tl;dr: Multiple cores won't help improving boot times. Better programming and faster hard drives will. - cquinnd, on 11/05/2008, -2/+11Are we talking about the previews that were still based on XP code (PDC 2003) or the later revamp when they changed the driver model and started moving components out of ring 0?
If they don't need to revamp the core code again, and they have a greater focus on code optimization, then they stand a better chance of ending up with a better boot time just by tweaking the existing boot process. - harrison5394, on 11/06/2008, -1/+10and that would still be cheaper than buying a mac.
- inactive, on 11/05/2008, -25/+34My Ubuntu 8.10 boots faster than all of those. :D
- BlackKnight6, on 11/05/2008, -3/+11Kinda lame he has Windows 7 on an IDE harddrive and XP and Vista on SATA, not a good way to test if you are trying to make sure things are truly equal.
Also, how long has he been using Vista and Win7? Vista (and I am assuming Win7) adjust the booting process according to what you actually use, sometimes disabling services you never make use of. If these are fresh installs then Vista and Win7 are slower than what they would be once optimized for the user.
Which brings in another issue. For those who just check email and use word, Vista (again, I assume Win 7) will have alot of services disabled and boot faster compared to another user that uses more features and services of the OS.
Just thought I should make these points known when looking at this "test". - enantiodromia, on 11/05/2008, -1/+9i have 2 vista machines and 2 xp machines. guess which ones are the ones that crash/BSOD?
- benologist, on 11/05/2008, -0/+8About a hundred thousand ad impressions of value to Gawker Media.
- Kamujin, on 11/05/2008, -14/+22Who are you trying to kid?
- Bith8654, on 11/05/2008, -0/+7I know very little about hardware, but I thought the read process WOULD get faster as solid-state drives become more common...but feel free to let me know how wrong I am.
- ctrlfreak13, on 11/05/2008, -1/+8Did you not read the part where it said the tests were on the same machine?
- veriix, on 11/05/2008, -1/+8hibernate that bitch!
- skipdog172, on 11/05/2008, -5/+11because you have a slow or improperly configured PC. sorry to break this news to you.
- unknownsoldierX, on 11/06/2008, -0/+6>It already does on vista. I've got my boot sequence using >all 4 cores on my rig. Noticed a few second difference >once I activated that.
If you are referring to the setting in msconfig, you didn't activate anything. All that does is limit the number of cores used at boot. All cores are used by default. - lordtyros, on 11/05/2008, -4/+10Hey moron, don't shut down your laptop then.
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