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Microsoft explains faster boot times
SOFTWARE OUTFIT Microsoft has released details on how it speeds up Windows 8 boot times.
In a blog post, the head of Microsoft Windows and Windows Live, Steven Sinofsky said, "Boot is the sort of effort that gets no respect. It is either too long or all the work to make it nice and pleasant hopefully goes unnoticed since you never want to boot your machine."
He added, "In building Windows 8, we set out of take advantage of some new technology and revisited some old assumptions to totally rethink the boot experience. We also wanted to make it more accessible and better suited to devices without keyboards."
Programme manager Billie Sue Chafins said in the post, "Boot is a highly visible portion of the system - users see it on average 1-2 times per day. That's already too much, but this post is not about making reboots go away. We recognize that this number will change as slates and devices that are always on become more prevalent, but for those times when you may still need to boot, we want it to be fast and fluid."
Chafins said the Windows 8 boot experience will be "fast and fluid, seamless", adding that by "leveraging the capabilities of UEFI and working together with the ecosystem, our goal is for the PC to power up to the manufacturer's logo and stay on that screen all the way from POST to Windows logon UI".
The firm also talked about the new design of the 'blue screen of death' in Windows 8, saying, "Things may go wrong with hardware from time to time, so there was no way to completely rid the world of the BSOD. We worked through several design iterations to determine how much information to display.
"We wanted to meet the needs of power users (whether you're troubleshooting your machine or a family member's) and at the same time, make it less scary for the consumer."
Earlier this month, The INQUIRER reported that Microsoft was talking up the fast boot times of Windows 8. The firm tested Windows 8 start up times compared with Windows 7 on 30 computers. The results showed that Windows 8 won every time, with at least a quarter of boot time saved, if not as much as three quarters.
Part of the reason why Windows 8 boot times are so fast is because Microsoft has taken a different approach than it did with previous versions. For example, Windows 8 hibernates the kernel session instead of closing it, which is significantly faster than the Windows 7 approach. On start up the processes are also divided so that the hibernated files are loaded simultaneously with driver initialisation, which means multi-core processors can be put to good use for quicker start up.
Microsoft is expected to launch Windows 8 next year. µ
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Their offering has nothing to do with boot times, not in the sense of making it faster. That's just a side effect. What they are after is the allusion that Linux isn't all that much better than they are. This fast boot time is a Linux thing. For the past few releases of Ubuntu (and other distros) they have been improving boot times drastically. This has happened over the past 1.5 to 2 years. It's Microsoft's time to chime in with their own improvements or look like they aren't capable.
Yes, much of their fast boot is due to hardware improvements and it has to do with illusion as well. Give the user fast access to the desktop and spend the rest of the time, while the user thinks things are done, completing the boot process in the background.
Microsoft isn't about innovation. And, BTW, why would anyone need Windows 8? On your tablet? I don't think so. I think iOS and Android are kicking Microsoft's butt. Microsoft needs to kick start their phone OS and the applets that are designed for their new interface will likely work on their phone. That's why they are becoming the dictator (like Apple) about how software can be installed for Win8's touch features.
Again, Win7 is enough for everyone for the next few years. I can't see anyone that has Win7 in need of an upgrade for any reason. No one is going to use touch screens on the desktop on a regular basis. People want to relax when they use their computer not be hunched over their real life desktop in order to get close enough to the screen to touch a few icons and move some green squares around, at least not for long. That's a stressing process.
Win7 is enough. Linux is enough. OS X is enough. Enough is enough already Microsoft. Stop stealing the ideas from the other OSes in order to make you look innovative. You are not, and never have been.
Repeat after me:
SOLID STATE DRIVES.
Of course, it also helps if the software is not a bloated piece of crap.
Also, I take it Microsoft wants to make 'friendlier' BSODs. From what I make of 'friendly' error messages in IE, it is a bad idea. Please, don't dumb it down with emotional, politically-correct, assuring language.
Perform the fresh boot process optionally *upon shut-down* (when the meat-machine has already wandered off to have dinner), and have the PC squirrel the results away on the local drive. Then, upon power-up, pour the results from local drive back into the machine state. Should only take a few seconds, as fast as your DMA can move the bits.
And *for gawd's sake* (!!), limit the size of the state image to the actual size of the meaningful state. Just cause a machine has 4GB of ram doesn't mean that the state needs to be 4GB (1GB of state and 3 GB of zeroes).
Dumb and a tree stump some of these people. Geesh...
What cannot be improved are driver and display initialization times.
I've a version of XP that's usable 30 seconds out of BIOS on a quite ordinary old Slot 1 Athlon. So if your new 3GHz and HD are a little faster, it's not due to M$ suddenly doing it the right way.
Faster boot times are great and all, but really, the 20 seconds it takes me now to boot into windows 7 is perfectly acceptable. Then maybe another 30-40 seconds to load startup programs. If I had a SSD it would be even faster.
Faster boot times are not a great selling point for the new OS. They need to focus on performance and getting rid of all the useless stuff that run by default in Windows now. I shouldn't have to go into administrative tools and turn off at least a half dozen services that are 100% useless to me when I install my OS.
PC owners have been pleading with MS for years to improve the Windows boot. Evidently all that goofy "the PC is dead" blather put the fear of gawd into Redmond.
@Chris That's what a hard reboot is for. If you power down completely wait a few tick-tocks and power back up you get a fresh kernel, different than the rebooting they are referring to. When most people BSOD they either let windows reboot automatically or they hit the reset button - which is the same thing.
I don't particularly care how fast the base system loads all on it's own. Despite the constant whining from some quarters and the attempts by Crapintosh to use it as a point of comparison; Windows base boot times have never been that bad - in Windows 7 it's pretty lightning quick. What would impress me is if they have truly gotten multi-core booting to work this time so that all the things besides the operating system that you need to run can be loaded in some logical order instead of clogging the process queue by trying to go through all at once. It is all the things that need to load AFTER the base system that slow booting.
... if something was wonked up in the kernel, how will rebooting help?
As I recall MS worked with intel to get multi-core boot speedup on w7 already, so that part is not new.