Windows 8 UEFI Boot

[dagamer34]

Microsoft did a post about UEFI booting in Windows 8 "being too fast": http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/...or-pcs-that-boot-faster-than-ever-before.aspx

I'm guessing they used an SSD in this example, but has anyone actually found this to be true? I have a 128GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD on a MSI P67-GD80 mobo w/UEFI I believe and boot times to Windows 8 aren't really that different from Windows 7, about 15-20 seconds, a far cry from the 3-7 sec shown in their videos. Is their some setting I need to enable? Some magic I am missing? Thanks.

 

[mikeymikec]

I read something recently about a different sort of 'normal' boot-up routine on Win8. Admittedly I didn't think much of their "look, we can't be cheating because we're starting with the battery removed" comment, because hybrid standby mode might have been used. Hybrid standby (which is available in Vista/7) essentially does standby + hibernation at the same time, in case power is lost, Windows can revert to the memory image that was saved to disk.

Win7 with my normal HDD desktop setup takes ages to become 'normally' responsive if the memory image was used for the boot-up process, but it gets to logging on reasonably quickly. However, you can watch the memory usage steadily rise from an absurdly low figure back to the ~1GB mark over about the next 8 minutes.

With an SSD in the mix, it could read a more comprehensive disk image in no time at all I would have thought, especially considering the initial bits I heard about Win8 from MS along the lines of reduced memory usage (compared to Win7).

How quick did your machine start Win7 before you installed third party software?

 

[Lonyo]

The magic you are missing is disabling things in your UEFI such as third party controllers.

High end boards come loaded with stuff that delays the boot process, some of which you might not need/be using, like controllers for extra SATA ports.

 

[mikeymikec]

There's that as well. My favourite trick on XP to speed up the boot process was to disable any unnecessary IDE channels/masters/slaves because probing those tended to take a while, especially on Via controllers Vista/7 handles this particular point better so it doesn't make much difference in my experience, but disabling unnecessary extras in the BIOS can only help.