It's sad reading through most of these comments where it’s obvious that people have no clue. “Modify the boot.ini to add more processors” Sorry bud, it works in the opposite way. You DISABLE processors with that method you fool.

It's really not Vista's fault in this issue.
Companies and schools deploy computers with tons of security programs written on the computers. Usually one computer has all the programs written onto it at one time, and then the rest of the computers are "ghosted" to be completely identical.
This can DRASTICALLY slow down even the fastest computers. In high school, my school used all Windows XP SP2 computers through the whole school, all ghosted from one un-updated laptop (no updates after SP2 were ever installed).
The result was a nightmare; computers and laptops took roughly 5-10 minutes to boot, the computers all lagged and crashed within seconds of reaching the desktop, and teachers only let the kids use the computers to look up information for about 30 minutes. This, coupled with restricted internet access, 20+ computers connected to a single lag-infested network and a SynchronEyes program installed on each machine, made using any computer in the school next to impossible.

You've hit the nail on the head with a sledgehammer.
I believe that ownership is indeed the problem, and any semi-competent lawyer is going to have a field day on this issue.
If the user has no choice of OS, software, configuration or even log on times, then it'll be a cold day in Hell indeed before a court of Justice decides in favor of a company on salary issues such as these.
And as for Vista-bashing, I love doing that as much as the next geek, but you cannot gloat about the piss-poor adoption rates of Vista - especially in the corporate environment - and at the same time assume that Vista is by default the culprit.
The issue is boot and shutdown times in a corporate environment, with corporate-issued software and monitoring issues that the basic user doesn't have a clue of.

I leave my computer on when I leave the office, there is this cool new thing you can do and that is to press windows key + L and that locks your computer :)

Try that next time, it takes me about 3-4 seconds to start working since the easy and default way of 'unlocking' your system is to press a key comibination alt+ctrl+del and then enter your password.

And as magic windows welcomes you to start operating the machine directly.

Long boot up times in companies are operating system agnostic. How long it takes to boot up in companies is dependent on more than what operating system they use. The time required depends on what all is taking place during the boot. E.g., some companies do a complete virus check on boot, others are making network connections, validating network sign-ons, running scripts, connecting to servers, etc. Also, in many companies, everyone is trying to boot at the same time (start of workday) and the network is bogged down and the servers overloaded.

Four years ago in our company, it took 45 minutes to sign on in some offices due to running required security scripts, lack of bandwidth, too few servers, and underpowered desktop machines. We upgraded the servers, the PCs and the network, and boot times fell to about 2 minutes, running the same scripts as before.

Boot times of more than three minutes is very costly to a company and indicates poor allocation of resources and short-sighted business management.


The employer's are being ridiculous. Booting up a PC is part of one's job. As far as the boot time goes, I use Vista on my PC and it takes less time to boot than my wife's XP. It's not that bad an OS after SP1. I got it mainly for DX10, but so far haven't noticed that much difference in the same titles under DX10 on my PC or DX9 on my wife's. Go figure. Will Windows 7 be any better?

Instead of running out and getting a lawyer, just ask for a raise to make up the difference.

If you aren't getting a raise, quit and get a new job. Or be thankful you have a high-paying job in this economy.

We are definitely over-lawyered in this country.

These people are crying because they don't think they get paid enough. We all want to get paid more, crybabies. Quit whining and get back to work.

I am late to the party, but at work with a 100k+ employer the Win2K machine takes good 10 minutes to boot. First all the crap that the indian IT put in has to load, and then for some reason various patches are applied every single day! I tried to standby, but then I often cannot log in in the morning.
These companies though do have some nerve not paying for the boot up times! I do bring my @ss to the location, and I should be paid whether I am wasting time waiting for the computer, doing whatever other time wasting activities our company has, or actually working!

Obviously the 20 minute boot time is a very rough estimate of the collected amount of time it takes to boot up and shut down ALL computers in a business location, not a single PC. Anybody that thought they meant it took a single PC 20 minutes to boot up should visit their local physician for a checkup. 

I wonder if industries refuse to pay workers for the time it takes to get heavy machinery working. Crane operators have to climb ladders to reach their work place, then they have to "boot" the system as well and perform security checks. Is this time withdrawn from their paychecks? 

It's all bull, greedy employers trying to get away with paying lower wages.

How's all the little Balmers that popped out of the woodwork over this article!

That Vista is slow is *not* in dispute - its slow, and its slower than XP. If you have experienced otherwise, hello over there in your luckyverse.

What this article is actually about is the creep into Kafkaesque behaviour of employers - what planet are they one? The same one as the recent british government perhaps?

Well this is possible in the way that many "Vista Capable" PC's have only 512MB RAM and as said above, boot form network based image for lowering costs on hardware. And there's the specific software that companies use, that loads into memory at every boot, and antivirus and many other processes that eats RAM and forces the hard-drive to swap and work. I have seen a so-called "Vista Capable" machine with 512MB RAM and someone said is enough memory and it took 20 minutes to load only Outlook. I believe it's possible what's said above...

Shouldn't these companies also force their employees to buy Anti-Virus software for a safer Microsoft Windows workplace, and then force the employee to run the Anti-Virus software every morning, without pay, of course?
I am getting a kick out of this story!

as default, if u have dual / triple / quad etc. core cpu, vista as default only uses 1 core at boot for some reason.

to get a slightly faster boot, run msconfig, select boot tab, then advanced, then under "number of processors" (this means cores) select your number, so for quad core drop down select 4, then apply. Next time you reboot, hey presto it uses all cores instead of 1. 

Now why didnt M$oft enable it to detect cores and use them all as default? Should sue for that hehe...

It's because of your (and other media outlets') constant bashing on Vista, that our brain dead IT unit keeps us all running Windows 2000. And you think that Vista has slow boot up times? And besides, anyone who knows anything knows that Vista boots faster than XP. In an enterprise setting, the boot times are mostly due to the IT guys running scripts and all other other kinds of extraneous software to protect the users from themselves. It takes my computer a full 5 minutes to boot. Stop ragging on Vista, so we all can at least get upgraded to 2004 grade technology.

This type of news is what makes the inquirer so great. I pee myself LOL


hello there,
I work in a 150+ call center that's had 100+ staff for 7years. At least in Texas call-centers, managers would "try" to tell you to log in early, read the paper, etc to THEN be "open" to take calls at the start of your shift. Then both the union and att told us not to even touch our keyboards until the start of our shift. then, as of 11-17-08, there's a new program (?) which sees your schedule and wont even allow your pc to log on until the start of your shift. So, where is this article referring to "att"...they should visit overtimelawyer.com=they've WON several class action lawsuits in which call center employees out of goodwill would work early,late every day...Please reply as to where this is happening!

I guess the comentators don't understand. And maybe the author is missing one key element too.

We are not talking here about "how crap Vista is". Of course is boots faster than XP. In tens of seconds.

But not from a server-based image over the network. And that's what these companies often use.

You see, Vista boot-image is quite a bit larger than XP's. And I do have a friend who works for a large US pharma company and her computer takes 30+ minutes to boot.

This is aggravating and it represents a not unsubstantial portion of the 8 hour workday.

And if their disorganized sysadmin occassionaly tells them in the middle of the day to reboot, they do have to stay overtime because of that. It's over an hour of just sitting there on such day.

This is neither Vista bashing, nor we are talking about 1.5 minutes here.

The fix still doesn't account for the 5-15 minutes of useless time after putting in your username and password for logging in.

It's MY machine: That's why you're not paying me for boot/shutdown time.

It's YOUR machine: That's why you can snoop my emails and chats.

So.... which is it?

Does UPS pay it's drivers for the minute or so of warm-up time on a cold delivery truck? They own the trucks, so I'm betting they do!

Set your PC to boot at a specific time. Don't show up to work until you know the PC is booted. Problem solved.

If the company is going to pull crap like this, then make sure your not around for "free consultation" until your PC is booted.

Why do they boot up their computers if their employers don't want them to? If part of the job is to work on the computer then the company screwed up in its hardware/software choice, I think.
Maybe the employer can start deducting pay from the workers every time network goes down, a virus attacks or similar things happen.

well if the idiots must insist on holding all documents (like 60MB+ of data) on the desktop, the computers will be ultra slow on bootup. (someone breakout the hand crank, the hampster has died)

jeez aint you morons heard of NETWORK DRIVES! you know like M:,N:,S:,T:,Z:
its the admin's fault anyway for not forcing a cleanup of the users profiles and enforcing a total lockdown of the corporate network.

It's hardly the fault of the employees that the AT&T forces them to use such craptacular software like Vista.
AT&T is an awful company that really needs to be put down. Sue them out of existence.
Their employees would be doing the world a favor by turning over all the documents related to AT&T's participation in illegal domestic eavesdropping too. Frak 'em!

Vista has been faster to boot up than XP in my experience. 

Not that I'd stand for my employer deducting pay while my work PC boots regardless of the OS.

I can't imagine you'd care but the Vista bashing is getting a bit tiresome these days by the way. Fair enough it was a bit flaky with sod-all driver support at release but the modern Vista experience is pretty good - especially in its 64bit incarnation.

This article is missing something. Employers provide their employees with the equipment (computers) to do their jobs. That means that the employer has also chosen to have Windows Vista on those computers (not the employee). Cigna at least has an IT department, who surely tested Vista before deploying it, meaning that Cigna was well aware of Vista boot times before deploying systems equipped with Vista and therefore has no grounds for not paying employees for time used waiting for Vista to boot up or shut down. Prior knowledge of Vista performance and issues kills any defense Cigna might have (I'm picking on them because I use to work for them) and this also likely applies to the others. I don't know why it is taking their Vista systems up to 20 minutes to boot. Both my desktop and laptop have Vista (Business on the desk and Basic on the lappy) boot rather quickly, but then my systems are optimized. Are theirs? Probably not.

Vista bootup times should be *shorter* than XP, and in my experience are. A 20-minute bootup time is a configuration error, not an inherent Vista problem.

IT organisations should repave any system that arrives with Vista preinstalled. The OEMs are screwing it up, badly.

I've had this out with my employer in the past too - "you need to be signed in to windows and all systems by 9am"......but we'll only pay you from 9am.

Yeah right, I don't think so.

vista booting and shutingdown in 20 minutes? dont use vista on your mobile phone maybe..

These companies have some nerve really, no? The company where I work has such a rubbish IT-setup that it takes PC's with XP even longer than that to boot up. The worst case I've seen so far is a recent Lenovo laptop taking 45 minutes to boot! These companies shoud be sued for by the people that as a result have high bloodpressure and have to take medication from the endless waiting to be able to start their work...
I really can't wait to see what will happen when we have to use Vista here. In the end, we'll just have to boot the PC, have lunch and then turn the bl**dy thing off again.

The real issue? Company bloatware, malware and spyware. Some examples? Tivoli, Windows domains with thousands of users over large distances with rubbish connections, pc's with 256MB of ram (more of those left than you think in a lot of companies) and all the other remote control software that puts a drag on everything the PC has to run.
Don't get me started...