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Do macs turn on faster than PCs?

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I turn my gaming desktop off -- it has a tendency to wake up when in sleep, even hibernate sometimes. Something USB related I think, but I don't care enough to fight with it. Boots fast enough anyway (Momentus XT/Win 7).
 
My Win7 machine boots pretty fast with the OS on an SSD.

My mac mini definitely takes longer, but of course the specs are way worse.
 
My SSD array Win7 machine boots to ready desktop in 4 seconds if you don't count the LSI SAS BIOS...

My single SSD XP machine about 2-3 seconds, it doesn't even display the XP flag.

I have everything optimized and minimalized; the XP box boots to desktop idle damn near instantly, and there are no more than 15 running processes on a clean startup. Anything network, printer, whatever related that causes delays of any kind are disabled, as well as unused IDE ports, SATA ports, onboard NICs not being used, etc, and drives are explicitly set to avoid auto detection and enumeration on POST.
 
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I wouldn't say my mac boots instantly but noticeably faster than any pc I have. That isn't why I have one though. I use my mac for design work and my pc for self abuse.
 
Red Squirrel said:
Since UEFI came in the picture, I'd say yes or do macs have that too? UEFI makes bootup time so much slower on PCs because of all the added complexity, it's basically an OS on it's own so you have to boot two OSes now, not just one. It's a kick in the ass that my Core i7 machine takes longer to turn on than my old Core2Duo HTPC, because 10+ seconds is spent on the startup black screen before it finally POSTs and boots into the OS, while the older box is already done POST within 5 seconds and then Ubuntu takes maybe 10 seconds to boot.
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Macs have used UEFI since they went with Intel processors, so that's been about 7 years now. In fact UEFI is one of the reasons they boot so fast, as a well-tuned implementation can come up extremely quickly. That's also why high-end Win8 machines are so snappy to boot, and in practice the Mac boot advantage has dissipated quite a bit now that UEFI is the standard for new Win8 machines.

Though as always, this is heavily dependent on crapware. A high-end PC without crapware can reach parity with a Mac, but the moment you start adding all that junk it will slow down almost any Windows machine.
 
ViRGE said:
Macs have used UEFI since they went with Intel processors, so that's been about 7 years now. In fact UEFI is one of the reasons they boot so fast, as a well-tuned implementation can come up extremely quickly. That's also why high-end Win8 machines are so snappy to boot, and in practice the Mac boot advantage has dissipated quite a bit now that UEFI is the standard for new Win8 machines.

Though as always, this is heavily dependent on crapware. A high-end PC without crapware can reach parity with a Mac, but the moment you start adding all that junk it will slow down almost any Windows machine.
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That's odd because I find UEFI is so freaking slow compared to traditional BIOSes. It just seems to drag the post process so much to load all that crap. Black screen for 10-15 seconds, finally the mobo splash screen, for another 10 secs, then finally it starts to actually boot into the OS, which then only takes like 10 seconds. Guess it depends on the particular mobo.
 
Red Squirrel said:
That's odd because I find UEFI is so freaking slow compared to traditional BIOSes. It just seems to drag the post process so much to load all that crap. Black screen for 10-15 seconds, finally the mobo splash screen, for another 10 secs, then finally it starts to actually boot into the OS, which then only takes like 10 seconds. Guess it depends on the particular mobo.
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it is extremely mobo dependent. some take forever, some you hardly have time to press Esc before you're at the windows login screen.
 
Red Squirrel said:
That's odd because I find UEFI is so freaking slow compared to traditional BIOSes. It just seems to drag the post process so much to load all that crap. Black screen for 10-15 seconds, finally the mobo splash screen, for another 10 secs, then finally it starts to actually boot into the OS, which then only takes like 10 seconds. Guess it depends on the particular mobo.
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POST times can vary significantly. Especially if your motherboard is loaded with lots of additional crap.
 
Having had both Mac and Windows machines equipped with SSDs, they boot up in the same amount of time. Your friend doesn't know what they are talking about.
 
glen said:
This came up in a discussion with a friend of mine. She said that the great thing about Macs was primarily that they turn on virtually instantly. 1 is this actually true about Macs. 2 is this actually what people like about Macs?
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I think there are a lot of factors that go into a quick startup regardless of the operating system. My wife has an i7 iMac and if it is turned off it is not quick to boot. Its starting up from being off, not sleep, and its booting from a traditional hard disk and not a solid state drive.

Now, if it is on and not being used for a while it will go into sleep mode, and only press of the power button immediately brings it to life, acting as if it booted real quick--but that simply isn't the case. If you want a computer that boots quickly then buy and configure for such a thing. Personally, I don't know anyone that is in that much of a desperate hurry. If that were a case them sleep mode might change your life.
 
The thing to remember, is what slows down PC's during start-up so much, is all the useless crap put on the operating system, both by the PC manufacturer, and by the user.

Even with a hard drive (versus SSD), a fresh install of Windows is blazing fast. But once you add on all the stuff you let run in the background, it ties up resources, and slows it down. Depending on the system specs, and the operating system used, it can get worse.

I once was asked to look at a computer that belonged to a friend of a friend, and see if I could speed it up. This was in the early days of Vista, when PC manufacturers were putting it on systems it had no right to be on. The system in question was an Athlon 1.3GHz, with 512mb of PC-133 ram. When it finally got the O/S loaded, and up on the desktop (20 minutes later), the taskbar was literally more than half way across the screen! 😵

To make matters worse, it was a strange type of ram that the manufacturer used on the motherboard, and buying another 512mb stick was going to cost over $100. I told my friend to tell the guy to reinstall Windows, then sell it, and buy something with better specs! 🙄
 
Lonyo said:
53433.png


POST times can vary significantly. Especially if your motherboard is loaded with lots of additional crap.
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Interesting. So some even take like 25 seconds? That's insane. Don't know why they could not just stick to the regular bios, it took like 5 seconds at most on any motherboard with memory test off.

My Motherboard is a Gigabyte X79-UD3 and is not on there, but I see most of the Gigabytes on there score fairly low. Well even the highest one is kinda long. 9 seconds is quite a long time just to POST.
 
drebo said:
My PC can turn on instantly, too, if I put it to sleep instead of shut it down.
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/thread

This is why that SSD boot time argument doesn't make any sense. Oh wow the computer turns on in 2 seconds! Just like every other computer that has a regular slow hard drive....
My parents didn't like having their computers wasting power, so I set them to sleep after 5 minutes and not require a password on wake. That sleep thing is the greatest improvement in computer hardware.
 
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Red Squirrel said:
Wait, so that was not a full cold boot?
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nope. regular shutdown does not perform a full cold boot when you flip the power back on with windows 8. it's about halfway between a full cold boot and hibernation. a restart results in a full cold boot.










as for speed, with just an SSD involved my asrock z77 extreme 4 boots so fast i have a hard time getting into bios. the blu ray writer really slows boot down, though.
 
ElFenix said:
as for speed, with just an SSD involved my asrock z77 extreme 4 boots so fast i have a hard time getting into bios. the blu ray writer really slows boot down, though.
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Mash the delete key before you can see anything on the screen. I need to do that when using one of my keyboards because it seems to have some kind of delay. If I wait until I see the stuff on screen, it's already too late, and I can't enter the BIOS.
 
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