Are long POST/boot times necessary?

[thewhat]

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.

 

[Turbonium]

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.

 

[dkm777]

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.

 

[dinker99]

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!

 

[2is]

My ASUS board also takes ridiculously long to POST.

 

[Ryun]

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).

 

[DominionSeraph]

My Dimension E521's NForce4 only takes 4-5 seconds to reach NTLDR. Even without optimizing BIOS (disabling floppy and unused SATA ports, setting HDD as first boot device) it only takes ~6 seconds.

Horrible quality video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrFYx5FEZtE

 

[Dislikeyou]

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

 

[Zap]

You can see here that it is possible to boot ridiculously fast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpviWpTaTFA

I'd like to see that in a desktop "enthusiast" motherboard. My notebook computers have always POSTed fast, in comparison to desktop motherboards (not "name brand" systems).

 

[thewhat]

You can see here that it is possible to boot ridiculously fast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpviWpTaTFA

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.

 

[The_Golden_Man]

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.

 

[JimmiG]

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).

 

[Wall Street]

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.

 

[cmdrdredd]

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.

 

[Magic Carpet]

So.. my question still remains, is it necessary to have a long POST or not?

And the answer remains the same, yes.

 

[thewhat]

So how does Phoenix Instant Boot do it? Where's the catch?

 

[Magic Carpet]

So how does Phoenix Instant Boot do it? Where's the catch?

Different design.

 

[Charles Kozierok]

The best way to avoid long boot times: use the sleep feature whenever possible.