Windows 7 does not boot faster

The hell it doesn't. Any real world testing will tell you that it's much quicker to boot.

And it gets faster over time, so does Vista. That's the whole idea of Superfetch. "SuperFetch also keeps track of what times of day that applications are used, which allows it to intelligently pre-load information that is expected to be used in the near future."

But of course, let's believe the guys trying to sell us useless system tune up software. Or let's believe Ina Fried, who can't make up her mind on her gender, let alone which OS boots quicker.

... are they using Windows 7 RC for these tests or the RTM release instead?

Doesn't seem fair if they're not using final code.

Maybe we should all go back to Windows 3.1, that boots really quickly on my Core 2 Duo, or maybe back to the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum or Amstrad CPC for instant on technology.

Rob

My issue with bootup is not with a new computer. It's how bad it gets as they age. My XP now takes 5-10min to get to the point where I can surf the net. If Windows 7 can cut that time in half I'll be really happy. The 3 and 6 month numbers are the important ones

I tested the RC1 of Win7 and my installed copy of Vista SP2,... they both boot to desktop in 42 seconds.

I'll have to agree, boot times are more or less the same (I'm using RC1 too). That being said, I'll agree that it does feel faster since the desktop pops up sooner as the article says, but also, the speed of the RTM version is considerably faster than RC1.

My PC is last DDR1 AMD393 (very good then) with 2x250GB (single platter) in RAID0 ... takes 45 secs for WinXp to boot fresh... prob still less than a minute 6 months after last install.
I use tweaks... Indexing goes off after a week, Sys restore... Page file is on backup drive (5GB partition).

Vast majority of ppl who I saw load WinXp for 3-4 mins have either: so much crapware and gazzilion toolbars as they click on every ". no excuses for ignoranceinstall this" or are seriously malware/virus ridden..

Even a minute and a half seems too much of a boot time. My XP boots for less than minute and yes I have to wait 30 secs till my WiFi figures there is no DHCP in the lan (I need to keep this service enabled since I use it outside home too).
BTW Gordon, my XP is 14 months old and still boots under 1 min (with password login), cause I don't install software I don't use/need. This goes for every Windows out there: you keep it clean - it keeps running well...

This is far from the truth, there's plenty of forums out there with people posting their results. There's even a batch file that runs a restart and records the time it takes, i can get a 47 second shutdown and startup time my vista install was over 1 1/2 mins. Don't believe everything you read, especially when it's coming from a retailer of tuning software.

Who cares? In the days of suspend and hibernate, full boots aren't necessary every time you want to use your PC.

In that time span, I can have multiple sex acts(you know me, speedy gonzales)

Inquirer, you eejits. As Section32 mentioned - your results come from speculative analysis (your own experience) and from a company that tailors solutions meant to speed up windows start-ups - it's like posting an article that says 'shock horror Apple computers found to be virus ridden says Antivirus software company specialising in software for Mac'

On a site note, it is possible that you could have a longer boot to usable than Vista depending on your applications and drivers. Drivers can add up to 60 seconds in boot time, not to mention any software that isn't designed to run on Windows 7.

Result is your comparing a race between a man with one leg and a man with two.

Sensationalism at it's best - is it really that hard to accept MS have actually got everything right for once?
W7 is bloody good, really darn good.

Only the time from Hibernate is important. (assuming it works right)

The reboot minimum once a week isn't really important.

Change your desktop background from an image to a solid colour and then see how it boots. ;)

I think you'll be surprised.

Puh. Rubbish bunch tests by Iolo, who in the world uses all of the OS capabilities in the first minute. I bet most people just fire up Outlook or Firefox or open some folder window... it doesn't matter that some services come up a little later.

Boot times are extremely dependant on three things;

1. The amount of crap you have on startup (autoloading programs/drivers)

2. The fragmentation of your file system. (heavily fragmented systems do everything slowly)

3. The real life speed of your hard drive. A combination of read speed & access times & I/O.

On a decent drive, like WD RE3, little to no fragmentation (with a tool like diskeeper) & very little startup programs & drivers, you should get a boot time of roughly 40 seconds.

A faster drive (higher platter density, higher RPM, preferably SAS or SSD) will achieve lower boot times.
Even a high end SSD will only manage to boot in roughly 15 seconds...

To make a long story short, how important are those 25 seconds to you? & who cares if vista boots faster?

Bottom line, windows 7 could be great, without all the DRM crap & so called "safeguards".

Here is our new porsche sir, to start it you must fill this form, to press the gas you have to fill these in triplicates, to break you need a code, and of course; before you do anything, call us to make sure we sold it to you.

Discounting POST, once the last SATA boot config screen disappears I boot W7 in six seconds flat to desktop and 18 seconds including Comodo Internet Security and Network. Got to love the I7 and a Kingston SSD.

This is from a company that sells software to speed your pc up. The last thing they want is to show you dont need it. Obivously they will say our product is the dogs and it will make it faster.
Funnily the register reviewed it on Vista and it slowed it down, FAIL!
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/10/08/review_pc_tune_up_sofware_vista/page2.html
They are doing a 7 comparison soon too so we will see how people without an interest in selling you useless crapware has to say about it.

So a vendor who makes a living off selling system tweak utilities of dubious benefit are stating that these same tools are still required for Windows-7. Imagine that!!!

yes it does boot faster!, on my hardware at least.

and vista is unbelievable slow on start up and shutdown.

In the olden days when machines crashed often, the price of (re)booting was important. I don't think win 7 crashes often. Just leave it in sleep, if you care much for booting delays.

I am running the latest OS as well. It is super-stable, and boots in 21 seconds (or 8 seconds on a SSD) on a "last generation" computer. Would do the same on a current econo-box machine.

And I am not sure about the comment about fragmentation slowing things down...I have no file fragmentation problems on my machine at all (and it has been running this OS for 8 months). No problems with viruses or malware, either (and it was free, to "boot").

Oh wait a sec...it's running Ubuntu 9.04 and the EXT4 file system. That would explain it. I also got to make a couple of mortgage payments with all the money I saved by not buying Win7 and an new computer.

OMFG wtF !!1 I needz my computar 2 boot asAP!

Are people trying to google the number for poison control after drinking bleach? A few seconds here and there after you press the power button isn't going to make or break you. As long as its snappy when its up and running who really cares about 1min 30sec vs 1min 47sec?

Just thought I would mention that Fedora 11 (linux) boots in under 25 seconds (my setup is around 20). And that's a fully usable (yes I know, some people argue that windows is more usable...) desktop, etc.

this is a article about os's. Not is the techincal sense, but in its literal, ie systems that operate, wireless card, printer etc.. on fedora.

Would you give your grandma a pc with fedora on, if so it tell you about yourself, if not well... why not?

anyone with Vista/7 recommended (or greater) amount of RAM in their system knows that it's better to avoid hibernation (takes longer to shutdown/boot). standby is not always an option (good battery backup is a must, system waking up for "no reason" is annoying and the little power used over the long period of time do add up).
i did not notice any major speed-up when switched to 7 beta/rc from vista (64 bit).
any system with boot time longer than minute and 30 secs needs to be re-imaged or the owner may want to spend some time trying to remove most of the startup items (new setup is preferred option). no excuse for such a waste of time

Been using the leaked W7 RTM for a couple of months now, loaded onto a 4 year old laptop with a gig of ram and an old sempron. Boots in 2 mins, haven’t had a bsod, very stable! I must admit that only today i wondered what tricks were employed to get the boot speed up, and yes it’s those core drivers which give good user experience that are loaded first, do anything but look at the pretty screen and it just hiccups until everything else is loaded. Now, need to try defrag and clean those temp files!

XP SP2:

BIOS to 0 HD activity (full load; not just a pretty desktop): 45 seconds. 110 Mb RAM used of 512 Mb installed.

Add in an additional 15 seconds for my chosen Run entries (including AntiVir) to load.

How? (C)Lean out your services; use your brain with regard to what you require at startup; and KILL THE PAGEFILE.

WAKE UP PEOPLE.

Stop chasing the latest shiny beads and use what you already have to its full potential.

Stop arguing over which of the latest flavors of crap which M$ has extruded onto your hard drives is the tastiest...

I enabled using multiple CPU's for booting on my Q6600. With only 2GB of RAM I also obtain a shutdown + startup time sub 1 minute. Hibernate works well most of the time though so I sleep the computer before bed or leaving, and it pops up super fast when I need to use it. My Core2 duo 2.0GHZ Studio XPS even seems to boot in about a minute or less when I get to work... So basically I don't know WTF they are talking about, because when I first got my laptop it had vista loaded and it was a dog. Granted it has all that crap installed, but still.

So a company that sells "tune-up" software, which of course is generally useless, decides to say that Windows 7 is slower to boot than Vista and we all just take them at their word and even give them space in widely read news blogs?

I hope you got paid well enough to compensate the hit to your credibility this article caused.

I find Windows 7 (64-bit Pro, RTM) to take about the same amount of time to boot as Vista did. My boot times are around 40secs, but I am on a RAID 0 array. Half that time is POST and RAID BIOS screens.

Boot up is when the computer becomes usable, not when it is in full idle. If it was using the majority of my 4 cores or possibly even 1 I might agree with their methodology. But I'd rather start being able to use it sooner than have it do nothing sooner, as I'm sure most people would.

Is that even Linux has better driver support than W7. I'm sticking with XP-64 for my Windoze OS until the darn wireless starts to work in W7.

My Dell Studio 15 laptop, out of the box was about 2 minutes to network ready. 12 months later it takes 5-7 minutes, depending on the phases of the moon. Hibernating used to be quite fast (30-60 seconds) but travelling between work and home, different network etc, confuses the hell out of hibernate and gradually it's become so slow and buggy it's easier/safer to shutdown and reboot from scratch. And connecting to an exchange server from outlook? - add another minute or two before even a few, text only emails have been received [massive sigh]

Nowadays I look with envy at the Apple philes at work with their 30sec startup from cold and 3-5seconds from hibernate.

The test went till idle cpu cycles, which is a major flaw! Windows 7 uses idle cycles to do work like preloading applications which you regularly use, maintenance etc... It's fully usable well before this point. Who ever did this test does not know enough about what they are testing.

Great ad for Iolo, Nick. So when did your transformation from hick hack to software hawker become effective?

time to slavegrade up from xp.

What bs sensationalist headline. Sure, if you cram the startup full of bloatware, it'll take minutes to settle down, but fresh Win7 install, with only rivatuner in startup processes, Win7 boots in 10s from Intel SSD, and 30s from Samsung F1; to a fully usable state. This, with all necessary 3rd party drivers; Intel chipset and Matrix Storage, Forceware 190.62, Creative X-Fi and Logitech SetPoint.

... it fails to "launch" as Microsoft is hoping. Balmer will be quick started right out the door.

But, like roaches, the Balmers of the business world are hard to get rid of.

vista probably takes 40sec to 1 min.. after the desktop appears to become fully usefull.

so if they measured from when the dektop became visible.. i would say their measurement method is a little flawed.

i had vista and let me tell you it took alot longer than 7 did..i notice 7 boots alot faster right away,any person can figure that out just my watching the screen...this article is laughable at best

My XP now takes 5-10min to get to the point where I can surf the net. Try Linux.
I have XP on a gaming rig and after I am on the screen it takes another minute or two for the freaking firewall to set in and the system to become usable. It was not always like that and it happened on a update one day. I think there are some wait commands in the registries, I need to look it over and do a keyword search of it. I think it was a MS hack to F up XP and make use want to upgrade.

On my 3+ year old Dell Inspiron laptop: 2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 160GB 5400RPM hard drive. From cold power off to working Windows XP SP3 desktop takes 14 seconds give or take a twitchy timing finger.

We all know that Vista was/is/will always be a turd. Windows 7 is (much) polish applied to the latter turd.

1. As long as it doesn't boot instantly, I don't care if it takes 20 seconds or 1 minute. Gimme a break. It's not like everyone tries to squeeze out those 40 seconds out of their day, cause they are so damn busy.
2. Whats wrong with sleep mode anyway?

When corporate IT is done provisioning it with auto-updaters, scanners, backup utilities, and network managers, Windows 7 will take 5 minutes to boot up just the same as Windows XP. Now who again is the enemy here?

This article has at least 2 problems:
- Fails to list who these "Computer experts" are. No one is considered an "expert" unless highly recognised as such by the entire PC community around the world.
- Fails to list hardware used.

I'm invalidating this article.

'Someone special'is right & basically it all boils down to a finely tuned machine,just like a car,they need constant tuning for best performance.
Cut the 'bloated' third party AV app's-try Microsoft Security Essentials(it's FREE & doesn't hog resources),it's the cut down successor to Win Live One Care,once set up,you can ignore it completely.
Use C'Cleaner & Perfect Disk 10 for tip top defrags,you can even squeeze the boot files-if you first disable sys restore & re-enable after the defrag.
I use all three examples,along with'someone specials'suggestions, plus a velociraptor & my high end system flys, like the proverbials....off the end of a shovel.

Tuning is always good.
More simple: I made an image of W7 plus all software I need at time of first install of W7 using Acronis.
Now I run this clean image every month and my machine starts in no more than 80sec. including a fully opened IE.
This includes a Raid 1 setup plus 56 processes.