Vista looks promising...

[Jon855]

Fast On and Off: A Windows Vista computer starts and shuts down as quickly and reliably as a television, typically within 2 to 3 seconds. Windows Vista processes login scripts and startup programs and services in the background so you can start working right away. You'll also shut down and restart your computer less often by using the New Sleep state, a simple one-click on and off experience which not only reduces power consumption, but also delivers and protects user dat.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/confident.mspx

 

[drag]

Yep.

When I close the lid on my laptop, it goes to sleep. When I open it up it turns back on in less time then it takes for my TV to warm up. Works on OS X and Linux. It'll sit in sleep state for a week or two, or forever if I plug it in to the wall.

 

[Nothinman]

Running things in the background in XP is the cause of a lot of confusion and problems already, now they want to make it even worse? If you want fast on/off you should be using STR/STD, no need to buy a new OS from MS for that.

 

[Rilex]

I've never liked OS X power management. "Sleep" sucks my battery dry within 2 days.

I'd rather just use Hibernation with no power loss during the time the laptop is in hibernation.

Running things in the background in XP is the cause of a lot of confusion and problems already, now they want to make it even worse?

Why would it cause confusion?

 

[Nothinman]

Why would it cause confusion?

Because users click on things that aren't yet available, most of the time you just end up waiting for everything to startup because you need things like network connectivity. Getting your desktop up fast doesn't mean dick if you can't get to your data, print, etc.

 

[Rilex]

At least as of XP, Microsoft initalizes those things at boot time, not at login time.

A DHCP address must be obtained during boot time anyways...The Spooler service is started up a boot time.

There are many things that can be delayed without causing the user to wait at the desktop. Often times those "wait at the desktop" services are 3rd party, including A/V, firewalls, etc that have programs that load on user login.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Because users click on things that aren't yet available, most of the time you just end up waiting for everything to startup because you need things like network connectivity. Getting your desktop up fast doesn't mean dick if you can't get to your data, print, etc.

Heck, WinXP does that already. Shows you the desktop,but you can't actually do anything, as it spends another half a minute just loading the startup apps.

Simply put, there's a limit to how fast a computer can boot. It needs to load a certain amount of data to be usable, and that data must come off of the slowest part of the computer. The only ways to get around this are to:
1) drastically reduce the size of the files that must be loaded. Recoding them in machine code would probably help, but it'd also be expensive and time consuming to have someone do that.
2) cache the files in RAM. This means that the computer will be drawing more power when it's "off" in order to keep the RAM refreshed. Computers already do this though - Standby mode.
3) cache the files in a separate SRAM drive. This would be ridiculously expensive though, and thus not truly feasible.
4) reduce the number of files that load, which will reduce functionality - also not a good option.
5) Computers don't cold boot in an instant. Get used to it. 🙂

 

[Nothinman]

At least as of XP, Microsoft initalizes those things at boot time, not at login time.

A DHCP address must be obtained during boot time anyways...The Spooler service is started up a boot time.

But they're not always finished starting by the time the GINA starts so users attempt to login, if just the NT GINA is in use it'll pause for a minute and then finally login with cached credentials if the network still isn't up.

 

[Seeruk]

Are you trying to tell us this is something that only happens in XP? If so you talk crap! Linux and any other OS on the system is the same.

My Ubuntu Rig takes twice as long as XP to boot even though it has less startup applications and the wireless isnt ready for about another 60 secs after booting.

My Solaris box takes even longer!

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Seeruk
Are you trying to tell us this is something that only happens in XP? If so you talk crap! Linux and any other OS on the system is the same.

My Ubuntu Rig takes twice as long as XP to boot even though it has less startup applications and the wireless isnt ready for about another 60 secs after booting.

My Solaris box takes even longer!

When my desktop is up, it's useable right away, using XFCE here.
Can't say I've measured the time it takes to boot up since I don't really care, 30 or 60 seconds doesn't matter to me.

 

[nweaver]

I don't reboot my Linux box except for every 60 to 90 days, so boot time isn't much of a factor. It's nice to apply updates without having to reboot, check again, possibly reboot again...

 

[Nothinman]

Are you trying to tell us this is something that only happens in XP? If so you talk crap! Linux and any other OS on the system is the same.

My Ubuntu Rig takes twice as long as XP to boot even though it has less startup applications and the wireless isnt ready for about another 60 secs after booting.

Currently just about every Linux distribution runs the init scripts serially, so there's no guessing as to whether the services are started or not. And at least you can fix the Ubuntu box if you want. My Debian laptop is 100% ready to go by the time gdm starts so I have no idea what Ubuntu does different. And I use hibernation most of the time anyway, so bootup time is irrelevant.

 

[drag]

I agree.

Boot up time should be mostly irrelevent in a modern OS. I reboot maybe once a week at most. Sometimes go months without rebooting. What matters more is the ability to do hibernate or sleep...

It's much much more efficient and with hibernate it's not any more power-hungry then shutting down. Think about start up time for all your applications. For instance when I play Doom3 it starts up much quicker and maps load quicker after I've run it once and quit then when I run it right after a reboot. This, of course, is due to memory management and since I have a gig of RAM large portions of 'used' memory are just cache in case I want to rerun stuff I stopped running earlier. When you reboot you loose all this and you have to end up re-reading it all back into ram to get everything as fast as it should be again. When you hibernate/sleep then you don't have to worry about it.

What Microsoft should do to make things much easier for Vista users is remove the requirement that you have to reboot during most updates and driver installs if at all possible. (I understand that sometimes it's unavoidable)

I mean that I can install Debian from a netinstall cdrom faster then I can install Windows XP on the same computer even though with the debian I am pulling all the installation files from a ftp server on the internet. With Debian I'd have to reboot 2, maybe 3, times to finish a install... 1. boot up the cdrom, install os. 2. boot up OS, update OS with most recent kernel and other things, 3. reboot up OS and it's finished (and that's only if I decide to update the kernel to a different thing then default). With Windows XP on the other hand I would have to reboot more then a dozen time and I'd still have to pull down virus scanners and such and probably those would require a reboot themselves for whatever reasons.

Plus if MS is able to do that then it would be much much easier to convince people to keep their machines up to date. If there is a critical update or whatnot then you could do something like have a icon pop up on the task bar. So that when somebody is working on a word document or a report or something they would just hit the updates(2) button, it would warn them to save what they are working on 'just in case', or whatever and continue on with their work as the system patches itself. No reboot, no fuss, no muss. Like nothing happenned.

 

[TGS]

Agreed, boot times are fairly irrelevant. At least to me. Heck my W2K box has been on for at least two weeks without a reboot. Only from a recent memory problem, have I gotten two hard locks in the recent past. I definately find more use out of hibernation than anything else.

Even if someone rebooted regularly, say once a week, does booting up 10-20 seconds faster make that much of an impact in the overall computing experience?

Now if you rebooted every half hour... 😉

Originally posted by: Seeruk
Are you trying to tell us this is something that only happens in XP? If so you talk crap! Linux and any other OS on the system is the same.

My Ubuntu Rig takes twice as long as XP to boot even though it has less startup applications and the wireless isnt ready for about another 60 secs after booting.

My Solaris box takes even longer!

Check out bootchart, and InitNG

 

[TGS]

(hit reply, ignore)

 

[TWills]

I can't hit delete that fast !@#$$#$%^&*( :|

Or are we talking os startup from the point of boot device found?

lol of course we are 😉