A common topic of discussion in the Windows world – in fact, in any operating system – is boot performance. Many systems take a long time to reach a usable desktop from the moment the power switch is pressed, and this can be quite annoying if it takes too long. In a post on the Engineering 7 blog, Michael Fortin, lead engineer of Microsoft’s Fundamentals/Core Operating System Group, explains what Microsoft is doing to make Windows 7 boot faster.
The goal of Windows 7 is to make most systems have a cold boot time of 15 seconds or less. Data from the Customer Experience Improvement Program shows that 35% of Windows Vista SP1 systems boots in under 30 seconds, and that 75% boots in under 50 seconds. These results are confirmed by external analysis. In these metrics, a boot is completed once the system has logged on and a usable desktop is presented to the user. “It is not a perfect metric,” Fortin admits, “but one that does capture the vast majority of issues.”
Fortin admits that too few systems have proper, fast boot times “and we have to do much better”. One of the first things Fortin explains – even though he doesn’t flat out say it – is that boot times of off-the-shelf systems can be dramatically improved simply by removing al of the crapware that OEMs include in their systems. Installing a clean installation of Windows Vista SP1 on such an OEM machine can cut the boot time nearly in half. It could be further improved by making some BIOS changes.
The improvements planned for Windows 7 are:
- Increased parallelism of driver initialization
- Improvements in the “prefetching” logic and mechanisms (and questioning its use when it comes to SSDs)
- Better diagnostics tools and more help for users to fix boot issues
In addition, Fortin explains that many third party programs simply aren’t of a high enough standard, and that they can seriously affect boot performance. “Microsoft must continue to provide the tools for developers to write high performance software and the tools for end-users to identify the software on their system that might contribute to performance that isn’t meeting expectations. Windows itself must also continue to improve the defensive tactics it uses to isolate and inform the end-user about software that might contribute to poor performance.”
I don`t get it – why waste precious resources on something of so little importance as boot time?
How many times a day do you spend rebooting your systems. I can see an importance for devs, but if your boot takes more than say 90 secs, there is somehing else wrong with your PC anyway. People should learn to stretch during booting
Windows PCs don`t need reboot as often as they used to do. Use sleep/hibernation instead.
I disagree. As humans we should try to excel at everything we do.
If all people had the attitude you express, all human progress would have stopped in the 18th Century.
Edited 2008-09-01 09:33 UTC
Of course, but we need to make preferences. I will prefer safer and easier Windows over fast boot time any day. MS should shift their devs to stuff that matters more.
But as this clearly means something else for evey user, that is a moot point.
Matters more to you, you mean.
Of course.
Windows is safer. The latest analysis of Vista shows that almost all the vulnerabilities that exist (for vista) are not due to Windows but due to third party components such as Flash and Java. (.net will become a larger problem if not fixed when it has a greater penetration on the web)
Safer?
Only if safe means “security”, because Vista crashes a lot everywhere and it is sluggish.
How is sluggishness or crashing dangerous, then?
“Oh no, my OS crashed, now those hax0rz have my credit cards!” ?
So you see an importance for devs, but still you insist that boot time is not important? Boot time IS important. I’m testing computers and software a lot in my company, and it’s annoying to spend hours every day to just wait for Windows to reboot. This is just wasted time. Also, when you just want to quickly start your computer to lok for something you don’t want to wait ages until it’s up and running. Boot time CAN be improved though, my MacBook proves it: It boots from nothing to a fully usable desktop in ~30 secs. When I put it to sleep, Mac OS takes less time to wake up than I need to fully open the display.
So what ? One of my machines – which also serves as a multimedia pc – has Windows on it, is always shut down into hibernation, and it “boots” up below 20 seconds. I don’t need faster than that, better get those people working on features that matter.
Ha, it’s funny that my Mac boots almost in the time where Windows wakes up from hibernation …
You’re right, hibernation is pretty fast to boot up, but it’s not always an alternative. There are scenarios where you have to REALLY shut down your computer, or reboot, for example when you installed new software. It’s just awkward when you have to wait minutes for a reboot.
As long as we’re trading annecdotes, my ThinkPad resumes from hibernation in about the time that my MacBook is still displaying that grey Apple logo.
You have to reboot your computer when you have installed new software?
I have to do that only when some really basic system component like kernel or glibc is updated, but not for normal software.
exactly my point
Everything should be faster and more streamlined. If there’s one thing that irritates me about computers it’s sitting there waiting for the PC to boot when I just want to look up something quick.
It’s a mental thing I know, but the PC seems to boot slower when you have less time to wait.
My hope is one day PCs can get all the hardware initialisation done (the bit before the OS) as quick as consoles do. I’d settle for a long initial scan which is saved each boot up can be excused from 10 seconds of checks. Sure it’d be my responsibility to run another scan if my hardware changes, but that happens far less often that does booting my PC.
Well, in my case, when I hibernate or sleep my computer, every system fan, including the GPU fan remains on constantly. I don’t care who’se fault this is, only that, as a result, I have to shut down and start up my computer every day.
What you said about the fans staying on during sleep would indicate the sleep mode being used is S1, not S3. Checking the BIOS may yield an option for you. Unfortunately, some BIOS’s do not provide such an option. There’s also the frustrating possibility that some components in your PC aren’t compatible with S3 sleep. I deeply dislike it when that happens…
The fancy new “green” features on hardware (i.e. hybrid SLI) is all well and good, but I’d rather hardware manufacturers cracked down on the driver teams to make the drivers compatible with existing stuff like sleep/hibernate. There’s so much wasted potential in energy savings (not to mention energy bills, which will change consumer minds quickly). Many PCs are kept always-on simply because sleep modes have so many compatiblity problems.
Boot time is important.
For servers it reduces downtime.
For consumer electronics is improves the user experience ( Sony has Linux booting down to less than 5 sec on their TV sets .. but that is still way too long.)
And after all it is just nice to not wait for stupid stuff like the computer booting into a usable state.
You know, I’m willing to bet this is pretty much the only reason MS is working so much on the boot time issue. If it were just an issue of user experience, they’d continue to fall back on their “our (carefully controlled) lab tests (with impossibly awesome hardware) clearly prove that Vista is the fastest system ever!” story.
I’ve shopped for Windows-based hosting exactly never, but I don’t imagine there are that many offerings running on Vista, and the few that exist probably don’t offer 99.999% uptime. MS knows they have to have something with acceptable boot performance out before Windows Server 2003 reaches end-of-life, or there will be a lot of companies jumping ship.
Well, for 99.999% uptime you would need a hell of alot of redundancy anyway, with Windows you just need a little more than with others.
Why do they have to boot Linux at all on their TVs? They could use solid state memory and simply load up with out running through a boot process.
Well, even if you don’t boot that often – it’s one less argument for *insert_os_other_than_windows* fanboy mob to rant about on their blogs
You see people complaining about how there are no real benefits/iprovements to Vista over XP, but as soon as MS is actualy trying to optimize something for their next release they ask “why?”. WTF?
“You see people complaining about how there are no real benefits/iprovements to Vista over XP, but as soon as MS is actualy trying to optimize something for their next release they ask “why?”. WTF?”
1: It’s not necessarily the same group of people saying both things.
2: those two sentiments are not mutually exclusive. The planned boot speed improvements are to be for Windows 7, not Vista.
[/rocketScience]
I for one don’t like waiting for yonks for my laptop to boot up on the way to work. With my home box i totally agree but for mobile systems which get turned on and off to conserve battery life boot time is very important.
IMHO that`s what various sleep and hibernation states are for. THAT is a real development. Not being forced to close apps, reboot, and open all those apps and document over again.
I speak from home/non-dev professional (video) perspective.
Those were added (many hours/developer) because boot time were suboptimal and the inability to save state.
Boot time optimization is solving the problem at its root.
I would rather they make it so I don’t have to reboot as much.
A very large number of Windows users seem to shutdown and reboot their machines rather than using hibernate. Fortin’s team gets this from telemetry data. When summed over the population of Windows users, a 10 second improvement in boot time is probably several months worth of human time saved per day.
http://www.splashtop.com/
Have a look here for ideas why its a good idea.
Every release should start faster as engineering improves. That’s something I expect.
On a Windows computer, as shipped by an OEM, however. Microsoft have the problem that whilst they bale water out of system, the OEMs are peppering the boat with a machine gun, laughing maniacally.
The amount of craplets, their complete needlessness, and poor quality is only going to go away with a complete ethical, and moral change of viewpoint in software developers for Windows.
I’ve powered on new computers with 13 icons in the tray.
Why is quicktime in the tray? What the heck is it doing there??? A media player loads when the media is loaded, it doesn’t need to be there at all.
I’m a hard line person, and if I were in charge of Windows 7, I would remove the system tray entirely and tell Vendors that they will have to write system services if they have any important stuff to do. All tray icons are banned. It has become a cess-pool of Vendors trying to force their brand and re-implementations of the wheel on users.
In fact, an article I write about how I feel about this kind of thing was picked up on Reddit because of the emotions behind this kind of problem:
http://camendesign.com/?200806291149 (A list of people who need to stop writing software)
If you knew HOW MUCH I AGREE WITH YOU!! Why is it that the first thing you have to do with a Windows laptop is to completely wipe the harddisk and install a plain Windows from scratch, while when you buy a new MacBook or iMac, you just boot it and start to USE it right away?
Edited 2008-09-01 09:39 UTC
Why? because of all the poorly coded crap the OEMs throw on the laptops.
Apple is the only OEM for Macs and they also develop the OS, no need to make poorly coded add on crap.
either you’ve never bought a “windows” laptop, or you are referring to the amount of crap that gets bundled with “windows” laptops…
in the second case its because you buy a “windows” laptop from a laptop manufacturer who makes money from the stuff they supply ON TOP OF windows (but not from the OS itself)…
and when you buy an apple laptop you are actually buying from the OS maker so they already are making a profit on the OS and the hardware so no need to add other crap.
Have a think about it. Apple are in control of the entire process, but on the windows side there are elements from different companies so there will obviously be differences.
Microsoft dont sell laptops.
Edited 2008-09-02 03:02 UTC
They do add other crap but gasp its stuff that people actually find useful (iLife). They have trial software installed like some of the Omni stuff and some of their own software like aperture. What they don’t do is have the machine boot up with five different apps asking you to pay attention to them or have the ever bloated Roxio start a service to burn disc (why the hell do I need a sytem tray icon to burn cd/dvds). They don’t have symmantec bothering you with both a system tray icon and a pop-up screaming at you to update. Every app they do install in OSX can be easily removed from your machine and there is nothing starting up on your machine.
I understand what you are saying but OEMs need to get their act together and MS isn’t helping any. Though if windows were free to OEMs they would still put crap on it and pocket the money they get from the crapware, if that isn’t what they are already doing.
That’s perfectly true, but honestly I don’t care much WHY it is this way. It IS this way, and it sucks. I work at IT, so yes I bought a lot of Windows laptops. I just hate that I need to custom reinstall every Windows laptop I buy, while all the Macs I buy just work out of the box and just need a little configuration for our network environment. This truly sucks and is just one more reason for me to prefer Macs over PCs.
Edited 2008-09-02 06:18 UTC
@ system tray.
True, many many vendors are trying to put useless, annoying stuff there – but there are a few things that it’s usefull for.
1. Minimized applications that mostly run in the background (think media players, p2p clients, IM clients, etc)
2. Drivers for hardware that requires frequent settings adjustments (like selecting profiles for your joystick/wheel/gamepad – it would be very ineffecient to visit control panel just for those)
3. Stuff like battery meter or network icons. No need for a huge sidebar gadget, a 16×16 icon with a tooltip will do just fine.
Removing it completely would bring more harm than good in my opinion. For any decent software you have the option to disable it completely anyway (i.e. nvidia drivers that were mentioned in the article).
1. Should be negated by better window management. Minimize-to-tray is a hack to deal with the lack of better options in Windows, like virtual desktops. OS X has no such problems, and thus, no such need to minimize-to-tray.
2. A control panel that wasn’t like a choose-your-own-adventure would negate this. Like OS X. I can type a few letters into spotlight and find the setting I want straight away. For example, I can type “Workgroup” and open the network preference for the SMB workgroup right away.
3. These are the icons that the tray was supposed to be for, not for Quicktime icons and Touchpad icons and crap. The Network, Battery and Sound icon are the only ones that should be there and Microsoft should dictate the API to interface with them. Vista did the right thing by consolidating the network icons into one.
Improving Windows in ways that matter would easily negate the need for Vendor icons in the tray.
Vendors however have this itch to replace perfectly fine built in functionality with their own crap. That needs to stop. Use the built in systems and keep drivers as drivers and not as monstrous machine rape-software.
though osx does not have a minimize-to-tray, it does have a tray in the top right corner.
That’s because OSX uses a dock, which has its own set of problems compared to Windows’ taskbar. Neither is ideal, nor is one better than the other. Oh, and Mac OS X also has a system tray that can be filled with useless crap.
The system tray is a very useful tool for things like IM clients and torrent applications and the like, because it allows them to get out of the way, while still being easily accessible.
How often have you used Windows Vista’s control panel? It allows you to do the exact same thing, you see. There’s a search text field in the top right, which also employs search-as-you-type.
The system tray, as I and others have explained, can be extremely useful. The fact that it’s being abused by crappy OEMs and lazy software developers is none of my concern. I have a distinctive use for the system tray.
The difference is that on OS X, the tray is not filled up with crap *for you*.
Cmd+Drag to remove an item. It takes surgery to remove some of the icons from the Windows tray. Have you ever tried to prevent qttask permanently? I’ve seen rootkits that were easier to remove.
No problem for me, as I use WinPatrol which blocks things like qttask (services, startup programs, etc.) before they are added
. It gives a nice little warning every time an application tries to add one, and allows you to allow the thing to be installed or not.
http://www.winpatrol.com/
Of course, like all Apple software for Windows, Quicktime sucks total ass, so I don’t install it at all.
Anyway, it’s Apple’s fault, not Windows’ or Microsoft’s. A good tray applications allows you to quit it from the tray.
Edited 2008-09-01 10:33 UTC
Completely agree with you there.
Apple are winning no new users with the great “experience” of Apple software on Windows.
And it’s odd. Because QuickTime/iTunes/Safari are awesome on Mac OS.
The biggest problem with iTunes on Windows is that it’s really, really slow, and installs all sorts of services for iPods and iPhones – which I don’t have. WinPatrol intercepts them, but it ruined it for me. I don’t use any of Apple’s applications on Windows. iTunes only makes sense if you actually use the iTunes service and own an iPod/iPhone. For strictly listening to music, it is overkill and slow.
The other big problem is of course Apple’s inability to design Windows applications as Windows applications. God, they’re ugly on Windows.
This is irony in its best incarnation. You are prasing Apple for creating a wonderful desktop experience, while you are blaming Microsoft for creating an awful desktop experience. And the example you give is removing the systray icon of an Apple application.
Maybe Apple applications on Windows are crapware, aye?
Yes, they are. I don’t even deny that.
Apple software on Windows is totally horrible.
But on OS X, it is great.
And I say that from experience, owning both.
There’s no hypocrisy there. That’s how Apple has decided to write its software. I doubt anybody who runs OS X and Windows would disagree.
I find that Quicktime and iTunes suck just as much on OS X as they do on Windows. They’re slow and heavy. VLC kicks the butt of Quicktime on EVERY front on OSX – even UI-wise, it is much more mature and usable than Qt.
iTunes is simply a dreadful music player. It might be suitable as store front-end, but as a music player, it simply tries to do too much, it presents me with too much useless information, and eats up way too many system resources.
Safari is great on OSX, but sucks balls on Windows.
Edited 2008-09-01 14:46 UTC
QT Player is the least important aspect of qt. Quicktime is industry standard of video postproduction (mainly) and delivery (less). Whole movies (most of them, actually) are built on foundations of QT codecs and interoperability, both on Macs and PCs.
Edited 2008-09-01 20:52 UTC
yeah, its easy. Granted, I use a simple, free, tiny, 3rd party tool called StartupCPL to remove startup entries from all over the system. But I’m fairly certain there is a simple startup setting for quicktime in its prefs, too.
I have no issues with the system tray. I find it really useful.
Just because *you* don’t like or find something useful, doesn’t mean it isn’t to others. And I disagree with it being a hack for Windows’ poor window management. Almost every OS I’ve used has something directly comparable to the system tray. BeOS, OSX, multiple Linux WMs. Hell, even Epoc32R5 has one iirc.
So it obviously was found to have uses. Unless you think its a “hack” on all these systems, as well?
Edited 2008-09-01 15:58 UTC
The function of Minimize to tray is a hack, the system tray itself is not. It’s just polluted.
It’s not as if Windows is unconfigurable. In addition, there are a number of alternative window managers that can be used in place of the default one on Windows.
Here is a screenshot of a theme from the Litestep window manager:
http://customize.org/screenshots/55110/download?v=53313
Note the existence of virtual desktops (the widget labeled “Desks”), and note the lack of a system tray.
Here is a theme from Blackbox for Windows:
http://www.boxshots.org/screenies/4975.jpg
The virtual desktop widget shows workspace “alpha” and it appears that this user has chosen to have a system tray. Both the virtual desktops and the system tray are optional, as neither are enabled in this user’s Blackbox theme:
http://www.boxshots.org/screenies/4960.png
Look at “Hypn’s Desktop” from the SharpEnvironment window manager for Windows:
http://www.sharpe-shell.org/e107_plugins/autogallery/autogallery.ph… Four virtual desktops and system tray are visible in this theme.
OSX has a lot less configurability for its typical user. There are options such as Oroborox and running X11 on OSX, but probably 95% of Mac users aren’t capable of taking even the first step to set those up. Shapeshifter is another option, but it is not that configurable in regards to the desktop elements.
The GUI that has the greatest usability is the one that best suits the particular user’s needs. Configurability helps many achieve their own, individual, optimum usability.
Edited 2008-09-01 19:53 UTC
Back when I still did Windows customising, Litestep wasn’t a window manager, but a desktop manager, which is a slightly different thing. In other words, Litestep didn’t theme the windows/borders, you needed Windowblinds or a hacked uxtheme.dll for that one.
That’s what always held me back later on. Just too much hassle. Now we have Vista which looks just fine, as far as I’m concerned.
I may not always agree with you, but you’re spot on here.
I think this is a good change, any time they’re able to analyze statistics from feedback and improve weak areas, is a plus to me.
What is much more insiduous than status-bar icons are ‘speed-launch’ applications that run in the background, holding certain dlls loaded so that your favourite PDF-Bloatware-reader can start up in under 5 minutes.
A lot of my income comes from removing these icons. He he ha ha ho ho.
High five
me too
There are two times which are important when you sit down to use a computer. The first is the time from power on to login screen. Here I think Windows is doing perfectly OK. My XP box brings up the login prompt faster than my Linux box.
The second, and in my opinion more important time, is the time from login until you have your first app running and can actually work in it. Here Windows seems to need some serious care. I really wish developers would spend more time optimizing this, since this to me is the delay I see most often.
Definitely, those 2 boot metrics (boot and login) are crucial to both performance, downtime and user experience.
About boot time, both Linux (initng) and Windows are trying to improve by parallelizing the tasks and this is a good thing. Normally you lookup devices, load drivers, start services, decide which services can be deferred and which are needed right now because it’s a boot due to an installation/upgrade. And very often scripts that do that either are synchronous or are being executed synchronously. This is room for improvement and every OS should try to be better and better at it since both developers and testers that work hard before any app is RTM’d and they reboot quite often.
Login time is a different thing, but we expect a lot from computers these days upon login. You’d like your RSS feeds ready, email checked, AV software updated and so on. A lot of apps are trying to work as soon as you login. Who knows maybe low priority i/o in windows 6 and windows 7 would help. I bet noone but microsoft really uses these right now.
No I really really wouldn’t. I want a desktop environment I can interact with ASAP. AV updates can wait until everything else is up and running and shoved at low priority in the background. RSS feeds and mail checks can also wait. I can’t read my mail or RSS until I open my mail client anyway, so why not wait with checking for new emails until it at least is possible to read them.
Personally I’d rather see development time and money invested in a replacement for HDDs for system files.
Sleep mode still uses power and hybernation, though brilliant when it works, doesn’t really fix the problem when systems require regular reboots (be it due to development, service pack installs or even just dodgy hardware / software). Where as a drive with the near instant read times like RAM (comparatively speaking to traditional HDDs) would remove the pain of waiting for systems to start up, shutdown and even remove some of the bottle-necks of day-to-day system usage.
It is called speed boost on Vista.
FWIW, Fedora is also actively working on this for the upcoming release of Fedora 10: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/30SecondStartup
A sleeping computer uses bugger all electricity. And if that is too much, moan at Dell, etc. until it is better.
I barely ever reboot my Mac, boot time is irrelevent once sleep works.
As a slight aside, making sleep work would do more for the energy crisis than faster boots as so many people leave their computers on all the time because boot time is too slow.
If you let an average desktop (100 W power consumption) run for a MONTH, guess how far you can drive your average american car for that amount of energy.
The answer is: Between 50 and 150 miles, depending on your car, speed, traffic.
You can also cool your average american house for about half a day.
So if you are serious about mastering the energy crisis, move close to your working place so you can go there by bike or walk, and build a well insulated house which has some thermal inertia (brick walls + insulation outside). Once you have accomplished this, start worrying about the leftovers like enery efficient lights, computers and the likes.
The energy crisis it definitely not something which can be mastered by living the same lifes as now. Seriously living new ways of life is unaviodable.
Please, guys, you are the more technically and mathematically savy people on the net (otherwise you would probably be reading “knitting adventures” blags
, get your orders of magnitude straight.
Power needed by:
Light bulb: 100 W
Low energy light bulb: 20 W
Desktop PC + LCD screen: 100 – 200 W
Laptop: 20 – 70 W
Kitchen hotplate: 500 – 1000W
Kitchen oven: 1000 W
Air condition: 1500 – 10000W
Car, average: 20000 – 40000 W
Car, peak: 50000 – 250000 W
Multiply above figures with the time which you use it, and you get the energy which is consumed by the device. These numbers you can compare, and then you can decide which change in YOUR life would have the biggest effect on energy usage.
Improving boot time? Didn’t they say the same thing for XP and Vista? Correct me if I am wrong.
Edited 2008-09-01 12:01 UTC
Well XP does boot up quickly. At least on a fresh install! My ageing P4 still boots XP in less than 30 seconds with a reasonably clean installation. Faster than Ubuntu, which takes about a minute.
No, you’re not wrong. They said XP would boot faster, and they said the same thing about Vista with the usual can of hype that gets opened before a release of Windows. Oh, and don’t mention Cairo or the object oriented Windows we were supposed to get either.
However, you’ll have to whisper all that around here as it’ll be denounced as a tired old joke that Thom will get all excited about.
Microsoft works on faster boot times?
Ops.
Get ready for 20 minutes boots…
It’s cool that Microsoft are trying to improve in this area. I’m a Linux man myself, but when I bought my laptop it came with Vista pre-installed, so I decided to take it for a spin prior to nuking it. Now this is a high-end machine, but the boot process was ridiculously, inexcusably lengthy. As someone else pointed out, suspend to RAM/HDD is common these days, but still think there is no excuse for the boot times to become longer with newer technology.
When I installed Arch Linux on the laptop, boot times became a lot shorter. However, they’re still not exactly great. I just measured about 40 seconds from the bootloader to a usable system (KDE4). If the Windows 7 guys are working towards a 15-second boot, then Linux distros are going to want to do some catching up.
There have been various different attempts to speed up boot times, such as initng and Upstart for more parallel boot scripts. Arch Linux does itself have a system for starting non-interdependent services in parallel. There are probably various ways in which the whole init stage can be improved, for example in Arch’s case dash could be used as a more lightweight alternative to bash for running boot scripts, but for further improvements I think changes could be needed in the Linux kernel too.
In my measurements today the kernel took in excess of 15 seconds to initialise before starting init. This is the MS target for completing boot and login altogether! In the article, starting hardware drivers in parallel is mentioned as a possibility for improving boot times. How does the Linux kernel fare on this front? Also, how much does the kernel boot time vary from distro to distro? I used to run a custom kernel when I was on Slackware, and that did improve my boot times by some degree. Is there more that packagers can be doing to improve kernel speeds?
Finally, Microsoft mention that they want to improve tools for analysing and optimising the boot process. Maybe a Windows version of Bootchart is in the works! However, one of the reasons that Bootchart is so useful on Linux is to do with the transparency and configurability of Linux systems. I used Windows exclusively for about 19 years, but the other day at work, when I wanted to add a service to start before user login, it turned out to be a major pain to figure out, whereas on any Linux system this is utterly trivial. Improving analysis of boot times is one thing, but are MS going to improve user configurability of the boot process?
There’s already some boot-time diagnostic tools which Microsoft and others have been using for a while to visualize and track boot performance. The older tool was called BootVis and it was for XP and 2k3. These days, the tool of choice is xbootmgr which produces disk and cpu daya with markings to correleate them to driver and software startup.
Getting stuff to run before login isn’t really that hard in Windows. There’s always been a facility for running startup scripts through Group Policy.
They did promise the same thing for Vista. Even working together with hardware vendors, creating flash/harddisc combinations. Yet no test I’m aware off showed an increase in boot time with extra flash components and boot time with some software installed is still horrible.
There isn’t anything new here. For every release of Windows since XP, they’ve been saying that boot time will be improved. But hell, with faster CPUs, more memory, faster hard drives being produced every year, I still don’t see the boot time is getting any shorter than previous releases of Windows.
In fact, Microsoft just says “There are a lot more things to do during boot up in Vista than there were in XP, so even when your boot time is more or less the same, the system is actually booting up faster.”, but doh, that’s just because the hardware are faster!
Edited 2008-09-01 16:20 UTC
It’s a good hint to know that Microsoft considers that boot time cannot be reduced that much on many systems. It means that they think they’re quite close to limit imposed by current technology (and Windows design, of course, but I don’t think this is much different for other OSes, given the same number of programs and services running).
This is really interesting. I noticed that when I saw that “shutting-down” my Vista system was now a bit “harder” given how you have to do it. Shutdown is somewhat hidden now. As for me, since Vista I use to hibernate (and sometimes suspend, but it’s not so common) my system. All in all, it’s much quicker than rebooting and besides, that’s not necessary at all in most cases. I use to reboot my PCs only when some program misbehaves and starts to act weirdly, even if sometimes it only needs to press Windows-L to switch to user selection screen and then enter my session again to solve problems. I thought it was the so-many-programs I use but this hint is useful to understand my system is not worse than normal ones 😉 Useful.
Blaming only OS (Windows or other) for slow boot times is actually nonsense. BIOS loader and hardware initialisation (both by BIOS and Windows) tend to take sometimes more time than OS loading.
Recently I built home PC with optional Vista boot. Initially it included one HDD and no USB devices; BIOS+Vista booted for about 25-30 seconds and Vista shutdown took about 4-5 seconds. Not bad IMHO.
Afterwards I added 2 more HDDs, tuner card and some USB devices. BIOS stage duration increased to about 20-25 seconds, BIOS+Vista does start about 50-60 seconds (same for BIOS+XP). Vista shutdown remained to 4-5 seconds though
Because I boot my PC rarely, I’ve not investigated, what to change in BIOS (newer BIOS version perhaps), what devices to replace or what drivers to block to make boot faster. I’ve even not optimised Vista yet – I’m mostly using XP.
On one forums I read about very slow POST – about one minute – for some motherboard. After disabling some monitoring same motherboard did POST for 15 seconds…
If OS developers could optimise devices loading time, it would be good. If hardware manufacturers (and BIOS writers) could shorten initialising times, it would even better
But at the same time, however, the situation isn’t helped when vendors themselves fail to use the latest technology at their disposal. Take EFI – why aren’t there EFI based computers shipping today with Windows Vista SP1? why are OEM vendors still using crappily shoddy ACPI implementations that require Windows to jump through hoops to get things working reliably?
Microsoft jumped around about how great the ‘horizontal model’ is – well, now you’re experiencing the result of the lack of coherency when the two major parts are seperated at birth – operating system done by one company, hardware done by another.
But then again, the IT is filled with people embracing what is trendy, cool and hip rather than what makes sense.
There are improvements, the problem is that OEM vendors aren’t willing to use them, hardware vendors want to invest the least amount of money into driver development, and customers want ‘cheap, cheap, cheap’ with no reflection on the consequences of their chanting. Like I said, people here, it is all about what is trendy – and most who praise the PC model don’t have the slightest clue about life before Microsoft. Quite frankly, I’d sooner have UNIX fragmentation than hardware fragmentation.
Because EFI is a steaming pile of dog turd that has many more possible implementations than the ACPI you deride. All EFI gives is is yet another set of even more interfaces that could have many possible implementations underneath. If anything, it makes things even worse as it pretends to be something it isn’t and is even more difficult to work around than what we have now. While BIOS isn’t great it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a boot loader, and even that has been difficult, EFI gets far, far too clever for its own good.
Unfortunately, Apple bought into this EFI hype that they’ll have to pay for, but fortunately, it looks as if EFI will never amount to a great deal in the wider world. As Linus Torvalds called it, it is Intel brain-damage, along with ACPI.
My 1mhz Atari 400 was ready to go almost as soon as I hit the power switch.
My 2.3Ghz desktop takes quite a bit longer to become usable after the power is applied.
So, there you go. The faster the computer, the longer you need to wait to use it.
my less than 1Mhz c64 booted instantly, my 8Mhz amiga booted the workbenich in like 10 seconds, my 2x 1.8Ghz mac boots in 30 seconds..
hmm.. do you also see the pattern here?
and don’t give me that “you can do more with your 2x 1.8Ghz mac” since the cpu power is also 3600 times more. 3600 times more powerfull, but it’s not 3600 times more usefull or faster in use!
please fix it, it can’t be that hard.
I agree and it’s something that has always interested me, our CPU’s are thousands of times faster and more powerful than our 6502’s from a few years back, yet they don’t seem that much faster…
Word on a Mac SE and my current Mac are very comparable. The current version of Word is doing more, but I’m pretty sure not thousands of things more, and certainly not all at the same time if it is 🙂
I think one problem is that as CPU speeds have increased rapidly, hard drive speeds haven’t. When a machine boots, it is loading a lot of stuff in and out of memory, each one hampered by the HD speed.
An Apple 2 or C64 basically installed just enough to get it up and running, a BASIC interpreter and a very simple DOS. I have a Mac emulator (vMac) on my current Mac and it boots a SE style Mac in less than a second, amazing to watch…
The other point to mention is that even though my old 68040 Mac for instance can runs things comparably with todays machines, I’d hate to encode a DVD with it. My current Mac takes minutes, the ol’ Mac would probably take a week or longer (if you ported the code in the first place that is)… I remember back in 2000 running the Java Swingset on it and you could see each line been drawn 🙂
I’m sure there are lots of reasons why todays machines are slower, a bit of it is down to not writing the most optimised code we could, but a lot has to do with things other than the CPU…
The “word processor” we have been using during those times ran on a 640×480 pixel screen, unaliased fonts and had less features than a todays text editor.
Use vi or emacs (or Kate) to write a latex document, you will see how fast todays computers really are.
They are talking about windows startup problems.
Anyway its not a bad idea. Even though I guess vista or 7 need to concentrate on the horrible bugs and slowness of the system in general.
When we read the article all we see is a blame on the other side, 3rd party software writers as well as users:
1. users should use sleep mode and hibernation or otherwise you should deserve what happens to you!!
2. 3rd party software writers should perfectly optimize their software not to use anything on windows so it can leave space for Microsoft applications to hide its problems (lets give an example: Live Onecare, windows live messenger,…)……those two horribly slow down system startup time…Microsoft should fix their software then work with others to solve their problems.
3. He didn’t mention that windows horrible unnecessary services should be killed so that performance return to its normal speed; eg de-fragmentation, indexing, volume shadow copy, windows update,….and the list goes on and on.
4. Windows optimization should be done to improve not only startup speed but applications startup, applications performance and inter-applications communincations
5. Do something about IE and Windows Explorer…they crash too frequently. I’ve seen this on hundreds of infected systems
6. Don’t force restart of windows just to please windows defender when it successfully found a virus; my work is more important than cleanup. Burning a DVD-DL and windows suddenly restarted!!!
7. Microsoft, you don’t want to listen and your departments are fragmented, in which each one doesn’t care about the other department as long as its not blamed by a problem. My hopes are low for you in your next release if its OK to call it a release
This is where usage patterns and user preferences play most important part: I for one DEMAND indexing, as it is one of the few reasons to switch to Vista (I know there is WDS and others, but Vista is much better integrated). Volume shadow copy is also very useful.
Windows just appeals to a too big crowd. Maybe if Microsoft came up with something like server roles for desktop. Want games? Make a minimal install. Work with documents? Turn on indexing and thumbnails.
Also keep in mind that some motherboards are including a built in bare bones operating system that is just enough to do certain things like check email and it’s instant on. I think that is actually a threat to microsoft the more instant on things they can do… and what directly conflicts with this is the time it takes to boot windows. Obviously this would not be a valuable feature if people didn’t care about their boot times but instant on can be nice for sure.
Does that mean that windows7 is about to be released in the next couple of weeks? Because as the editors of the site should know, windows7 was, until this article was released, atleast 6 years away from being released. Any talk about how quickly operating environment that will be released in 6 years time will be using technologies which will change in that time is quite silly.
Windows 7 years.
… like for example Guindous itself 🙂
Whats the point of a faster bootup if Windows is still going to be loading crap when you get to the desktop. That is my main issue with Windows. I can’ really use the desktop until it finishes loading whatever services at startup even after everything on your desktop is displayed. I’d rather they take the extra time at the beginnig than when the desktop shows up, because guess what I’m expecting the machine to be ready once I’m in the desktop. KDE/Gnome work this way, OSX, work this way but not Windows. I have to actively hunt down startup item and services to turn off in-order to get a decent boot experience. If they can work on that then that would be great. Vista actually did a better job of this than I though it would, its still slow but its a little better than XP is some instances.
Here’s my little two-step idea for resolving this:
1. Immediately following user login, Windows 7 should sit on an annoying “Loading your desktop…” screen. Each startup process should be named (using the readable name of its entry in Add/Remove Programs window) along with an indication of how much disk/CPU time it is taking. This way, any user should be able to spot the cause(s) of the long startup times.
2. THEN the Windows 7 development team should focus on making this “Loading your desktop…” screen take like 1-2 seconds max on a clean Windows 7 installation.
This would put the onus on bad application developers, where it belongs.
Sadly, it would never be implemented. OEMs are way too invested in deals with all those crap-ware developers. If Microsoft introduced a plan to point out to ordinary users that the OEM-bundled crapware was the root of the startup problems in Windows 7, you can bet none of the OEMs would jump on Windows 7. Catch-22.
Windows 7 shutdown times should also be targetted. When I tell Vista to reboot, it should not spend 2-3 minutes (no exaggeration!) sitting at a “shutting down” screen with no explanation of what is taking so damned long. 😛
I couldn’t care less about faster boot times, I’d rather they spent time improving logon times.
I’d rather have a system that took longer to boot, ensuring all services and devices are fully operation before the logon screen is presented.
Once the logon screen is presented, it should take no more than a few seconds to have a fully operational desktop.
Most modern operating systems I use suffer from this. It always takes an age after the first logon to get a single application launched and fully responsive. Subsequent logons are always much faster.
i don’t know why you were voted down, however i fully agree. A common complaint / perception of windows is not how long the windows takes to boot up but how long it takes to log in.
Even on a clean system it takes ages, with office even longer.
I would much prefer Windows to take longer booting to provide a quicker login. Vista is getting there, it’s a lot faster to login than XP. However i would prefer it quicker still.
I have a few pieces of legacy software, several of which are DirectX capable. If Windows 7 does not un-break all the software broken with Vista SP1, I will not be using Windows 7.
Microsoft better tread carefully and get the compatibility up real, real high or face the consequences: IT, Gamers and computer hobbyists will ban the use of everything past Windows XP.
Why silly, making Vista 2 boot faster is as easy as reformatting your hard drive, and installing XP.
Its always nice to have faster boot times, I hope they do it well! :o)