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Are long POST/boot times necessary?

T

thewhat

Member
I'm talking about the time before Windows (or whatever main OS) starts loading.

Is it a technical limitation or do motherboard makers just want to give users time to read information and interact?

Because 10-15 seconds or so (which I believe is still the norm, even with UEFI) is ridiculously long, IMO.
 
You can usually change the speed of initial bootup (or POST) in your BIOS settings. Doing so means it will skip general memory tests and such.
 
The more integrated devices there are the longer it takes to initialize them all. My Gigabyte board takes ridiculously long to POST. So long in fact that I almost decided against getting an SSD, since Windows boot time is negligible in comparison.
 
My Asus p9X79 Pro takes about 15 seconds for the BIOS to boot and then about ten seconds to load Win 7 from SSD. This board has a diagnostic LED display so you can watch as it goes thorugh the POST - very interesting the first few times!
 
My Asus board has a nice feature where I can set the time for the POST display (I think that's the name).

If 'Full Screen Logo' is disabled, I can control how long the motherboard displays POST info. I think the default is 3 or 5 secs. I just changed it to 1 (still plenty of time to get to the BIOS settings if need be).
 
My PC boots in 20-25 seconds. When i press power button and until i see Windows desktop. I am running Windows 7 in UEFI mode and i have fast boot options enabled on my Intel motherboard. I guess i could make it boot even faster by disabling stuff in the bios.

On the ASUS board that i had before it also did not take long time to boot. So UEFI motherboards seems to have a bit less boot time but i'm not sure whether its about UEFI or how its implemented because i have seen a old Pentium 4 PC recently that had fast boot option in the bios. So it's nothing new.

You can see here that it is possible to boot ridiculously fast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpviWpTaTFA
 
Dislikeyou said:
You can see here that it is possible to boot ridiculously fast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpviWpTaTFA
Click to expand...
That's quite amazing.

So.. my question still remains, is it necessary to have a long POST or not?
Are you perhaps sacrificing something if you do an instant boot like in that video (Phoenix Instant Boot)?

Yeah, I heard about more devices = longer, but I don't think having a small number of devices alone is what is making those laptops boot so much faster.


I'm suspecting motherboard makers just don't care enough about this and it's a damn shame if this is the case. Who wouldn't appreciate a faster boot? Even Microsoft is working hard on this, even though with SSDs the POST is actually longer than the OS loading.
 
Please remember to disable the Marvell/Jmicron or other third party SATA controllers on ASUS boards, if they are not in use. They really kills the boot time.
 
I think mobo manufacturers are working on this, because Microsoft will have more strict requirements on POST time for companies to display the Windows 8 logo.

At least computers don't test all your RAM like they did in the 90's (booting a system with 128MB of RAM could take quite some time at a time when most systems had 32MB or 64MB).

With my mobo, the slowest process is the detection of SATA devices. Detecting each one doesn't take that long, but I have quite a few. With my SSD, the POST almost takes as long as booting Windows (28 seconds total from power-on to Win7 desktop).
 
It would be easy for motherboard makers to make quick post. You would just need to give up extra USB 3.0 controllers, extra SATA 6 GBPS controllers, extra sound/network devices and only use the things that are integrated into the chipset naively. However, I think that the mobo manufacturers have realized that USB 3.0, more SATA ports and things like onboard wifi sell better than quicker boot times.
 
I like having the post screen delay 5 seconds. That way I can make sure all my drives ate detected and my full 8gb of memory is being read by the mobo. It probably isn't necessary though.
 
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