Windows 8 to boot in 8 seconds Microsoft is touting very fast boot times for Windows 8, thanks to the clever trick of writing the kernel state to disk at shutdown. Rather than write the whole contents of memory to Windows' hibernation file, Windows 8 just writes enough to be able to put the state of driver, services and such back into memory, ready to run, …
It sounds like some of you would be much, much happier if Windows 8 took longer to boot.
At least then you'd have some valid reasons for criticisms rather than this usual tripe..
If they add features it's anti-trust baiting bloatware
If they take them away then it's a rip off
If they have different versions then it's "confusing"
If they don't have different versions, then it's a rip off paying for unused features..
It's too different from the previous version
It's too similar to the previous version
This doesn't just go for Microsoft, but in general critics don't mind if other critics have entirely contradictory reasons for complaining... so long as they're complaining.
Yes it remains to be seen (which makes the whole business of prejudgements silly), however it seems apparent they even if they announce features that would be welcomed on any other system, some will find a reason to complain.
And complain, not that it'll be bad, but shock horror, it might be good, possibly successful and pervasive OS on everything from desktops to tablets. That would be awful, if M$ ever bring out a decent O/S you guys will have to find something else to bitch about.
Your mum's cooking perhaps?
"That would be awful, if M$ ever bring out a decent O/S you guys will have to find something else to bitch about."
Any of us who have been reading El Reg for some time have noticed that a certain section of the commentariat *will* regard it as a disaster if Win8 is any good and the trans-platform strategy is competently implemented.
@AC - Bang on.
It never ceases to amaze me the amount of things that IT guys manage to whinge about. Often it boils down to change, which is ironic for such a fast moving field.
"I've learned XYZ OS and can't be arsed to learn another, therefore I'll just bitch about the others in the hope that I can keep going with my single OS and keep my cushy job." Seems to be a very common reason for bitching other OSes. This goes for a certain group of all OS admins/devs: zOS, iOS(not that one!), UNIXes, Linuxes, Windows, Mac OS, all have these people and they're all tedious.
Still, one thing that I've learned in 12 years of working in IT is that you don't get anywhere by whinging all the time. I know people still on the helpdesk at my first company, whinging about the fact that they've not been promoted, but not actually doing anything about it. There are other people who started at the same time now in senior management, because they put themselves forward, embraced new stuff and made things better rather than just complaining about their lot.
Back in the olden days, my Windows System booted up from DOS to Windows in 2 seconds.
Then most linux-based X-Servers boot up in that timeframe, even when running on a Pentium 90.
The big problem is that this time doesn't reflect the true boot time. Those 8 seconds won't give you the services you usually need, like an SQL-Server or a webserver.
Around 1999 to 2000 I worked for the local council installing PCs and servers into council offices, schools and that sort of thing. Because Councils never permit anything new until they have tested it to death we were installing Windows 3.11 onto Desktops with a PII processor running at something like 450-500MHz
Boot time from cold to the logon screen was about as long as it would take you to read the following sentence out loud:
post, post, post, post, doswindows
As long as you read the last bit really quickly.
Your PC wasn't designed to run 24/7, the hard disk probably has a duty cycle of about 8 hours at a time. This doesn't mean to say that it won't run all day, but you'll reduce it's lifespan.
Having said that, I leave my Fedora netbook booted all the time and just close the lid when I'm finished with it, it does run on an SSD though. Last reboot was after a month of "uptime" becuase I accidentally let the battery run out.
Sounds like they are adding complexity at shutdown time, and whenever a real shutdown is needed, which I'm guessing will be a familiar scenario. I've seen some Windows systems take longer to shutdown than boot already...
What users would really appreciate is a system so stable it can be hibernated or suspended endlessly, apps and all, instead of being shut down. Some non-Microsoft systems already do this :)
You must have a really fast macbook air then, my wifes one isn't that fast. It is fast, but not 8 seconds fast. I have just put a new crucial 256GB SSD in my macbook pro, so now it is 28 seconds from power to useable desktop with apps and documents loaded (down from 67 seconds on a monumentus XT 500GB). I am quite happy with that, although I don't tend to restart.
However, I think it is good that people are trying to improve. My windows 7 machine only takes a few seconds to logon screen, but from start it takes a few minutes before it is in the state that you could call usable. I don't quite understand the linux / mac comments anyway - windows starting faster doesn't take anything away from you.
After all - it may take 2 minutes to get to a usable desktop in windows, but in linux, it has been 30 years and we are still waiting :) <runs>
Or they should be, but I don't see much evidence.
PC architecture dictates these ridiculous, non-threaded ways to initialise hardware. We may have progressed from ISA through PCI, PCI-x and (now) PCIe, but the model has remained the same for a long time.
Devices are dumb and rely on drivers to make them do anything. This is evident so clearly when your OS first starts the long crawl to usability, after power-on. Those lovely low-res graphics reminding you which OS you have installed. No greater reminder is there that we are relying on ridiculously outdated technology.
Where is the standard graphics interface? It shouldn't be difficult, what with all the muscle your average GPU carries (more than most PC's, if stories are to be believed). Windows should be interfacing with something resembling a fast framebuffer, but with obvious additional capabilities. Instead, Windows interfaces with a driver, which abstracts all of the fast stuff behind a lot of code. Sometimes the code doesn't do much and just passes and translates API calls, sometimes it does a *lot* of work to fool Windows into thinking it is dealing with native capabilities.
Until we morph the 'driver' model into something else, like a smart device with a teensy bit of glue code, those boot times are only ever going to get longer.
Mashing kernel images into a compressed file is just putting lipstick on a pig.
The CPU does NOT access a frame-buffer for rendering. The CPU might access textures to write to using aperture memory. After that it uses vertices, vertex shaders and pixel shaders (assuming a low-endish GPU) to cause a completely different co-processor to render the result to the screen.
The driver is responsible for handling the fact that all of these GPUs are incredibly different. They run different ISAs on their streaming units (basically a SIMD instruction set). You supply an instruction set that is JIT compiled to the correct architecture by the driver. Some GPUs run video on a general compute framework, other GPUs run video on very specific piexe of silicon. Lets not even talk about the fact that the memory ordering of all of the texture memory is specific to the GPU too to optimize cache locality.
In an ideal world all of this crazy capability would be standardized into an ISA and you could abandon the driver, but we are nowhere near having enough conformity in the hardware to allow this. But if you look at what AMD is implying by their roadmaps, seems to me like we'll get there.
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As soon as you turn on the damn PC, every installed program (including the OS) piles onto the Internet looking for updates. If they could simply block all the 'check for updates' app panic for the first twenty minutes after boot, then maybe I could actually get to the emergency situation information I require before it's too late.
In summary: Let the Meat Machine use the Internet FIRST, please and thank you.
Damn, I can't believe that it's 2011 and we still have ask for this basic, common sense sh!t. On most versions of Windows, even moving the cursor from the Start Button directly towards the Control Panel pops up the All Programs list, blocking the desired destination. Sigh...
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