PC Makers Try To Pinch Seconds From Their Boot Times 399
Some computers are never turned off, or at least rarely see any state less active than "standby," but others (for power savings or other reasons) need rebooting — daily, or even more often. The New York Times is running a short article which says that it's not just a few makers like Asus who are trying to take away some of the pain of waiting for computers, especially laptops, to boot up. While it's always been a minor annoyance to wait while a computer slowly grinds itself to readiness, "the agitation seems more intense than in the pre-Internet days," and manufacturers are actively trying to cut that wait down to a more bearable length. How bearable? A "very good system is one that boots in under 15 seconds," according to a Microsoft blog cited, and an HP source names an 18-month goal of 20-30 seconds.
So... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Boot time is a pain that we have had since the first IBM PC was released. And it's not only boot time but also shut down time that can be painful.
And for networked PC:s with a roaming profile you will get raped in boot time whenever you have a large profile for some reason.
Some of the time that it takes originates from the "need" to count memory and some for waiting on a bunch of devices to initialize and start. No parallel tasks during startup at all.
Only computer with a decent startup (under a second) that I have experienced was a computer with a ROM Basic interpreter, but then, that's a completely different animal.
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Only computer with a decent startup (under a second) that I have experienced was a computer with a ROM Basic interpreter, but then, that's a completely different animal.
If it took long enough for you to notice then something must have been wrong.
It's the time it takes for a human to notice (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually that is one of the reasons why things are still slow in general - because though CPUs and hardware get faster and faster, we're still living in a human world. So the "human notice" times remain important.
Lots of programmers have their programs wait for one second if they have to wait a minimum time for hardware or for other reasons, after all most seem to think "it's only one second".
A few 1 seconds here and it all adds up.
Silly? Maybe in many cases, BUT often you really do have to wait in seconds because it says "press ctrl-A for SCSI controller config" and so if the computer does not wait _seconds_ for the human and only waits _milliseconds_, the human is also going to be pissed off.
For a similar reason a windows PC can't boot faster than the X seconds for you to press F8 to enter "Safe Mode". Well it can, but it'll have to be "hold F8 down while booting", and that means some changes in the keyboard hardware and config stuff, some user education etc etc.
Also often the threshold for determining that something has gone wrong is more _human_ related. Say a hard drive has gone slightly flaky and takes a bit longer to spin up for whatever reason.
How long will a human wait for a harddrive to spin up? Pretty long in many cases. Even if it takes 30 seconds, they might still wait.
The BIOS could just assume it's dead, after all it's not behaving like a _normal_ hard drive. But the specs for _failure_ are often human related - they are determined by how long it is expected that a human will wait.
It's just like network connectivity timeouts are in the order of tens of seconds. Instead of say minutes. A tree might be willing to wait minutes or even days, but most humans don't want to wait minutes.
They're not in the order of milliseconds because the speed of light is too slow (light takes more than a few milliseconds to cross the world) and people are willing to wait seconds.
Re:It's the time it takes for a human to notice (Score:4, Interesting)
On RISC OS [wikipedia.org] to reset many of the BIOS settings (the ones normal fiddling is likely to screw up) you held down R as you switched the machine on, to fully reset the BIOS (to the point that you had to tell the machine it had a floppy disk drive again) you held down Delete. It started up to the GUI, ready to use, in about 10 seconds. Wikipedia says the record is 2 seconds.
A 1999 RISC OS [everything2.com] machine would go from power-on to a running web browser in 16 seconds.
Likewise, my phone manages to start up in less than 10 seconds, with another 5 or so if I try and immediately load the web browser.
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Say if you had two SCSI controllers and they both decided to use CTRL-A to enter their config screen.
You hold CTRL-A down, power on the machine and instantly you see the first SCSI controller's screen. No way to configure the second SCSI controller
You press escape, the machine reboots (that's what they all do, it appears easier to do than going to the next boot step) while you're still holding ctrl-a down and you see the first controller
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I usually config things in the fastest boot mode, but when I need to make changes (and thus watch boot screens and stuff), I temporarily config to a slower mode. So instead of an uber-menu, you would just have to work your way through each BIOS saying "Set slow boot, reboot" until you got to the one indicated.
Annoying, but, what, how much time do you spend in the BIOS compared to using the machine?
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That'll be nice. I hate waiting for all that crap when booting up servers. But I don't have a big enough stick to make Adaptec and friends do things differently.
SCSI option ROMs are the worst. Not only do they take FORever, they also often enough manage to conflict with PXE so that you cannot netboot at all. (I have good reasons to netboot a machine w/ SCSI drives).
Of course, in general, BIOS waste a LOT of time. Coreboot (formerly LinuxBIOS) is inevitably 10 times faster at least.
20 second boots cannot happen when the BIOS wastes 90 seconds itself.
Of course, while they're at it, they might consider smarter default configurations. Some BIOS support serial console r
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Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
>>>Boot time is a pain that we have had since the first IBM PC was released. And it's not only boot time but also shut down time that can be painful.
I disagree. Shutdown time is no big deal because you can go grab a snack while the computer shutsdown. You don't have to wait.
As for startup time, back in the days of floppy-based OSes like the IBM or Commodore Amiga, it only took 5 seconds to go from turn-on to a CLI or Workbench interface. Even faster with a hard drive.
The reason today's computers are so ridiculously slow is because they load a bunch of crap. Why? Do I need to have Itunes or Quicktime or Microsoft Office preloaded in the background? Absolutely not. If they followed the philosophy of earlier OSes, where programs were only loaded *when needed*, then the bootup time would be very short.
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well, for my laptop their equally important. IE, can I check my email between flights, and how much of my precious battery power is gone (or if I used up all my battery on the last movie, will their be enough residual juice to book that hotel change without a hard crash.)
Granted just drop a extra few hundred on a smart phone+ addtl $30 monthly service plan, or fly business/first class = a slow power cycle time costing a few hundred more per year.
Actually a slow shutdo
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
Your printer driver is now a complete rendering engine for a number of different formats that you may never use.
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It would make more sense to sub-divide the printer driver into twenty or thirty drivers, one for each format, and only load the one or two drivers you actually use, that way it only occupies ~2.5 megabytes of RAM rather than 50.
In addition the drivers would only load as needed, rather than at bootup. I don't even own a printer, so having the printer driver loaded is silly.
Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is sooo close to the overall truth to why Windows (and Linux) take so long to boot.
The systems in the DOS world were hard-coded via boot / initialization files to load exactly the hardware drivers for the hardware configured in the machine. Hardware was hand configured by a person, set to IRQ/DMA/Memory addresses that were generally accepted as appropriate, and conflicts were reconfigured manually. The autoexec.bat and config.sys files were manually tweaked by hand to reflect the different cards - and Boom! it all loaded lightning fast because it was simply following instructions - computers do this very well.
Current OSs have a gazillion different permutations of hardware that could present when they boot each time and they have the drivers for all the hardware present. They interrogate the hardware, every subsystem they can find on the different places that could have hardware and then one by one they load the different drivers for the cards, dynamically allocate the hardware (Plug n Play) with IRQs and DMAs and Memory locations and try it out to see if it works, try again if it doesn't. But it's a matter of 'Hello PCI slot #1 - what kind of card are you?' and then negotiating the drivers, hardware allcations, etc. That's why you can install the drivers for two different video cards, and each time you shut down / restart the system you can swap the video card for the other one and - the system boots up and works nicely - that's one nice benefit, the other benefit being that it's "easier" for the common user to get a system up and running.
The above is the reason that ultra-fast hard drives don't really make much difference in boot times, why stripping out processes make some but not a ton of difference - because the hardware interrogation / allocation / driver load process is not a particularly quick endeavor.
If we had a way to hard-code the list of hardware, and even the resource allocation (IRQ / DMA / Memory locations / etc) that the computer is running and guarantee to the OS that it is the same each time the system boots - that OS could boot a LOT faster than current systems boot. It might possibly be a way to boots that are faster than restoring a 'hibernate to disk' session because a 'hibernate to disk' session has to restore the complete system state regardless of system state, meaning it actually has to populate the entire system state including swap file, etc. A hardware boot with a predefined system configuration can configure the system and load the drivers for the base OS, leave the rest of the system basically uninitialized for use by programs as they allocate the memory once the user logs in and starts running programs.
It's one step backwards, and three steps forwards. Worth it? If someone decides so - go for it (just give me credit for the idea - that's how GPL works, right?)
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Boot time is a pain that we have had since the first IBM PC was released. And it's not only boot time but also shut down time that can be painful.
I don't mind boot time so much - what really gets on my nerves is when a machine comes on, pretends it's ready but is then maybe five minutes doing other stuff before you can actually use it while you stare at the screen and frustratedly try to click on things. That's especially bad in the roaming profile scenario you mentioned.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't mind boot time so much - what really gets on my nerves is when a machine comes on, pretends it's ready but is then maybe five minutes doing other stuff before you can actually use it while you stare at the screen and frustratedly try to click on things. That's especially bad in the roaming profile scenario you mentioned.
That's perhaps the worst part, as most people that have no idea of how a computer works will start clicking on progran after program, thus starting yet another parallel process that adds up to the rest. And parallel processes take more than the same ones in series because of memory/disk seek times and the need to share a common pipeline.
I always try to encourage people not to "start" after the screen appears, but after "the red light goes from always on to scarcely blinking". Of course most people ignore the advice and press things frantically till they end up CTRL-ALT-DELing and thinking it did the trick.
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Great idea! We shall call it "hibernation"!
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My Asus EEEPC with EEE Ubuntu boots in almost no time. I've never used a stop watch, so I don't have any number to spout out, but I've never had a Windows or Mac OS machine boot that quick.
Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/ [pcdecrapifier.com]
I don't understand. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why this is still an issue in this day and age.
For example, my Mac will go from startup to login in half the time of either Vista -or- Ubuntu (not counting what happens -after- login, but as far as applications go, they're fairly straightforward), but my TV will start in a second or two. So did my old Commodore 64.
How is it that the more power we get, the -longer- this takes? And why is it that the solution always involves hardware makers? Maybe we need to look at how our operating systems are constructed instead of blaming the hardware itself.
Re:I don't understand. (Score:5, Informative)
On a K6-II 350, BeOS would go from POST to booted and ready to rock in under 5 seconds. Faster boot times are possible but doing so may require some big changes to how everything works.
Re:I don't understand. (Score:5, Insightful)
BEos and it's original hardware was the last, best hope for a solid, no B.S. modern computer that was re-designed from scratch for maximum performance with pre-emtpive multitasking.
I see it as a chicken and egg problem. The barrier to entry in the OS market is extremely tough because software manufacturers won't invest the time in porting their apps unless the hardware or OS is established, and that can't happen without the software. The OS market is well beyond it's infancy now, not that it's a good thing.
The way I see it, it would have to get much, much worse than it is now for companies like Adobe to say "hey, lets throw our weight behind this new OS/Platform." For example, if MS completely bungled Windows 7, or whatever they are calling it these days. Two failed OS's in a row, and maybe it will finally make a dent in their market share. And I don't much like apple because their hardware prices remain artifically high, due to them being the sole provider for both OS and hardware. It doesn't help that MS also makes the world standard of office suites. They will always push their own OS with it first.
The competitiveness of the PC hardware market is excellent, and many previously frustrating compatiblity issues have gone away with the advent of newer motherboards and slot standards, narrowing the hardware quality control and consistency between PC hardware and Mac hardware.
PC hardware with a new OS would be great. Apple understandibly wants to control the hardware that Mac OSX runs on, because it's much easier to assure qualtiy and provide support that way. But that support comes at a cost. What we need is an OS that runs on generic hardware that is written from scratch for lean performance, by neither of those two vendors.
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New hardware or a new OS is doomed to failure because of proprietary software distributed only as binaries... Open source typically gets ported fairly quickly to a new OS or new architecture.
Your very right tho, proprietary vendors won't port their apps to an os or architecture which hasn't got any users, and it will never get any users without the apps people use.
If you want progress, then software needs to be open source, that way people making operating systems and hardware will be free to innovate safe
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Come on, BeOS fanboys. Tear back the nostalgia and BeOS was awful. Everything from disk I/O performance, networking, graphics was miserably slow. It was an OS designed to give good demos to get more investment capital. There was no reason to actually /run/ it and then live with it in the real world.
Pervasive multi-threading is premature optimisation bullshit, built in to the core of the OS. That BeOS fanboys loved this shows how much they're really related to ricers rather than actual users. The strategy in
Re:I don't understand. (Score:4, Insightful)
He said 'written for lean performance'. That is not Linux. I'm not saying Linux performs poorly, but it's hardly designed with performance being the primary goal, and it *certainly* doesn't boot nearly as fast as BeOS did.
"Linux" (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux actually can boot really quick. The kernel takes relatively trivial amount of time to get to 'init'. At that point, the distributions make choices in userspace that may make a distribution slow or fast to boot.
Linux can boot in 5 secounds (Score:3, Interesting)
In short it's about some Intel hackers makes Fedora boot in 5 secounds on an EEE PC, not exactly the best hardware.
Re:Linux can boot in 5 secounds (Score:5, Interesting)
The eee is one of the best machines for getting a fast boot time tho...
It has a bios that's capable of caching the power on state (so it doesn't have to run the normal tests every time), it has a static hardware configuration so it doesn't need to spend a lot of time probing for hardware, and it has solid state disks which don't need time to spin up.
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...but my TV will start in a second or two
Yeah, but look what's happening with modern TVs. Many new TVs take a second or two to change channels, and it seems to be getting worse. I don't know what it is about them, because my decade-old TV changes almost instantly.
Advance in some ways, regress in others (even if they are less important).
Re:I don't understand. (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably the most annoying side effect of digital tuners. It has to find the stream and begin to decode it. Your old TV changed channels instantly because it was an analog tuner with pre-set frequency decoding for each channel position. The TV did no thinking, it simply is looking at a different frequency on the receiver and de-modulating it into the CRT, and all of that happens at the speed of light.
Newer tuners are all digital, and while you generally get better picture quality even on analog channels, it has to capture the analog or digital transmission, decode it / encode it and then pass it on to the LCD display. Typically there's some 'start time' involved in this. I expect that particular feature will be a selling point to differentiate TVs in the future, once they've run out of other things and the tuner hardware becomes more powerful.
Re:I don't understand. (Score:5, Informative)
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Even that I can imagine being solved if you have sufficient processing power in the TV. How often is a key frame sent? Every five seconds? If the TV would figure out which 10 channels you are most likely to zap to next and store the last five seconds of compressed video for each of them, switching channels would just boil down to how quickly you could decode those five seconds of video.
Look at what happened with teletext. With e
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For example, my Mac will go from startup to login in half the time of either Vista -or- Ubuntu (not counting what happens -after- login, but as far as applications go, they're fairly straightforward), but my TV will start in a second or two. So did my old Commodore 64.
Your TV starts in a second because its boot sequence is generally about as long as it takes to copy the firmware into RAM. Its hardware is fixed, the software doesn't have to go around poking for it, and its entire firmware is probably under a megabyte of code loaded directly from NOR flash.
Your Commodore 64 ran from hard-wired ROM. Its OS (all 10 or so kilobytes of it) is burned into the chips soldered on the motherboard. It is running directly from ROM, it has no real boot sequence. Try loading GEOS o
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Your TV starts in a second because its boot sequence is generally about as long as it takes to copy the firmware into RAM. Its hardware is fixed, the software doesn't have to go around poking for it, and its entire firmware is probably under a megabyte of code loaded directly from NOR flash.
Oh well, my computer is equipped with a hard drive that can probably copy around 128MB of "firmware" (kernel and working sets of running processes saved from last boot) within a second. Its hardware is fixed and I am willing to press some key if I upgrade it and need the OS to poke around for changes at boot. So where is the justification for degraded performance aside from programmers' laziness? Fast boot requires some clever thinking, but not more so than writing text to CGA with maximum possible speed bu
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Speed is still an issue. A modern hard drive can do sustained reads of about 50MB/s in a straight line, an
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Re:I don't understand. (Score:5, Informative)
It's quite easy to recompile linux so it only has support for the hardware you have, it can be made to boot considerably quicker when you do this...
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``How is it that the more power we get, the -longer- this takes? And why is it that the solution always involves hardware makers? Maybe we need to look at how our operating systems are constructed instead of blaming the hardware itself.''
The time it takes to start up a computer is mostly determined by the firmware. Once the software has control of the system, you can boot an OS very quickly (Linux in a few seconds). But before the software gets to run, the firmware has control of the system. I've seen compu
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my TV will start in a second or two. So did my old Commodore 64. How is it that the more power we get, the -longer- this takes?
It's because we make our systems do more stuff. How much did those system do when they were started up?
Did they mount a couple of file systems, start cron+http+aptcache+distcc+cpufreqd+ntp daemons and wait for DHCP_ACK, then mount some more file systems and load up a highly configurable login screen?
I think it'd be easy to boot into a one-button gui saying "bring the system into a usable state now, please". XP does something like this.
Especially the TV comparison is unfair; the TV is a one-purpose box wit
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For desktop systems this is bad, but an even worse place to me is servers. Under normal circumstances a long boot time doesn't seem like it should be a big deal, but if it's a server that needs a reboot, often times, every second counts. Also, the times that a server does need to be rebooted, like when developing a new server build image it adds literally hours to the process of finalizing the server build just waiting the 7-10 minutes of POST processes that most server hardware goes through. There shoul
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What do you have in mind?
Re:I don't understand. (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously, we must stop using using pansy C/C++/Java/Ruby/etc... languages and go back to writing everything in assembler. Then boot times will rock!
Duh.
Re:I don't understand. (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously, we must stop using using pansy C/C++/Java/Ruby/etc... languages and go back to writing everything in assembler. Then boot times will rock!
Duh.
Maybe you intended for a funny, but i'd rather give insightful if I had points. I can't forget the wonderful playing experience with ELITE [wikipedia.org] on Commodore 64... and those days it was all machine code!
Nowadays the philosophy is that you can afford to be a sloppy programmer and use absurd languages (VirtualBasic?) just because Moore's law will eventually compensate... given a year or two.
Re:I don't understand. (Score:4, Insightful)
Gresham's Law (Score:4, Insightful)
yes, get back to me when your precious commodore supports LAN, WLAN, 3D graphics, hundreds of input and output peripherals and the literal million things that a modern PC can do
But on my 3.2 bajigahertz Pentium Dual-Quad PosiTraction(tm) Gold Edition PC that I'm typing this on:
- I don't use "hundreds of input and output peripherals". I use two. One more than I did on my C-64.
- I don't do any WLAN stuff ever. Just like I didn't on my C-64.
- I don't use anything LAN related on boot. Just like I didn't on my C-64.
- I don't use 3D graphics on boot. Just like I didn't on my C-64. Granted, I do use them when playing 3D games, but that's well after boot. And when I do use 3D graphics, I have a whole separate high-performance hardware subsystem dedicated solely to generating those 3D graphics. And guess what? My system's 3D performance is far *better* than that of my C-64's, while simultaneously delivering far *better* quality! Why can I have both speed and quality improvements in 3D graphics but not in boot time?
- I don't do a "million things" on boot. I rarely want to do more than one: select a local application which needs no LAN access and run it. Just like I did on my C-64.
So, it appears that your defense of PC boot slowness reduces to: "You're using a mouse now. That makes the 2 second boot times you got with your 1 MHz C-64 physically impossible, even with hardware that runs at THREE THOUSAND TIMES THAT SPEED and has over THIRTY THOUSAND TIMES the amount of RAM." Yeah, everything looks worse in black and white, doesn't it?
Here's the fact jack: PCs boot slow because users tolerate it. If all of a sudden PCs that took minutes to boot to a state where you could run Notepad started sitting on the shelves, guess what? Right: The problem would get solved. Very quickly. Why? Because all of a sudden there would be value to the MS's, Linuxes, and Dells of the world in doing the work required to make boot times what they should be.
This is purely and Econ 101 issue, not a technical one. It's called Gresham's Law: "Bad money drives out good". An Entity produces two PCs. One takes a second to boot, one takes two minutes to boot. Suckers I mean Customers accept either because they don't know any better, and once booted they both do pretty much the same thing anyway. Entity realizes this, and thinks to itself, "Hey, why are we busting our humps doing good work (1 second boot) when we can do shoddy work (2 minute boot) and sell just as many units at the same price?" That thinking immediately get translated into company policy to spend no effort worrying about boot time, and soon everybody has slow boot times.
But what can the sucker that *does* want non-slow boot times do? Pretty much nothing. A well-done, higly-publicized, up-to-date "consumer reports style" comparison of boot times of all currently available systems*OSes*configurations (I'm looking at you, Tom's Hardware) could conceivably force enough of a shift in the "fast and slow have equal value" situation to make it worth vendors' time to spend some effort on improving boot times, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
There is a reason for this "sloppyness": hardware is cheap while developer time is not.
Unless that developer is waiting for his machine to boot. Then, apparently, said developer's time is without cost.
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What percentage of that "billion people" use "hundreds of input and output periperals"? Ten? More than two?
100. PCs are ridiculously upgradable. The OS needs to not shit its pants when a component is changed. Then the need for time-outs and other ways of checking shit created by other vendors comes along. It's really technical, it might be a bit much for a CEO-like mind such as yours to handle.
And then the Entity's CEO buys himself another ivory backscratcher to celebrate the fact that he's conned yet another sucker into thinking that because he refuses to do something that it can't be done.
Yep. It's a big conspiracy to keep boot-times high. I mean, it's not like there's a market for laptops and accompanying OS's that can boot in a second. Nope, it's the oil companies trying to keep people's computers
Re:I have in mind my Apple G4 Powerbook (Score:5, Informative)
Not that I usually go out of my way to defend Vista, but the Dell Vostro 1500 running Vista SP1 that I'm typing this on does exactly what you describe.
Apart from security updates - which occur usually once a month - it never gets rebooted (and reboots do take longer than I'd prefer, but have never timed it), and I always just use Vista sleep in-between sessions. It's pretty much ready as soon as I finish opening the lid, and I'm happy with that as an instant-on.
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I'd be interested to know what the consumption would be when measured with a power meter.
My Macbook pro (battery almost 3 years old) gets about 72 hours of sleep time with intermittent wakeups for quick email via wi-fi. I would not even attempt that with my ubuntu thinkpad - unfortunately.
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Close it when I'm done, it just goes to sleep. Open it when I need a quick weather map, it takes but 2 seconds to connect and fetch the map, then just close it. And it always works just like that.
Let's see Vista do that! PS Windoze really does blow chunks.
Are you really that ignorant?
I mean, seriously. I reboot my machine once a month. And I close the lid on the VISTA X64 powered machine at least daily. It's my TV, my computer and my stereo, so it actually happens, more like, 4 or 5 times a day.
But seriously... Do you NEVER really open your eyes to anything else around you, unless it has an Apple on the front.
And here's a question, which OS had the sleep / hibernate feature first? I > win95, but since I REFUSED to have a laptop until the last couple
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Well, I put together a new workstation for CAD work at work. The mobo is an Intel S5000XVN.
It requires 30-40 seconds of "quiet time" every time it's powered on. Those are Intel's words, and that's before the hard drives get started.
The board is one of the few that supports more than 8G RAM and has a PCI-e x16 slot.
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It's simple, Bert64:
Fast CPU - cheap, and getting cheaper
Good programmer - expensive, and getting more pricey
Obviously, optimize the most expensive part first, i.e. get a cheaper programmer and have him use a "kiddie" language.
Suuuuure.... (Score:2)
Even Microsoft, whose bloated Windows software is often blamed for sluggish start times, has pledged to do its part in the next version of the operating system, saying on a company blog that "a very good system is one that boots in under 15 seconds."
I'll believe it when I see it.
There's nothing MS, Asus or anyone else can do to stop individuals (or computer mfgs) from loading up their computers with hard-drive-thrashing amounts of startup software.
Vista is particularly to blame with their nifty transparent desktop widgets that stretch the time it takes computers to go from off to useable.
Suuuuure....Silent Majority. (Score:2)
"Vista is particularly to blame with their nifty transparent desktop widgets that stretch the time it takes computers to go from off to useable."
And how many users are to blame for not turning Aero off?
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Flash drives... (Score:2)
... when they are ready will do a lot to alleviate the boot wait times. Although I'm sure a lot of wait time has to do with the programming of the bios/hardware initialization, not to mention programs optimized for the latency of hard drives. I noticed in previous versions of windows (and I'm certain even xp/vista still) when certain drivers load they can cause delays.
I've always wondered with the cheapness of ram, how hard/costly could it be after the first boot, and then simply have insta-boot thereafte
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It's called an SSD (solid state disk) [wikipedia.org] and sleep mode. Why even reboot? Unless there's a hardware addition that requires a power down, there's no reason to "reboot". Booting, by it's very nature, is simply the initialization of all the hardware in the system. In VISTA, even, most of this is done upon driver loading and in userland. If you have a ton of kernal initialization, it's going to be slow. And linux comes with a LOT of stuff in the kernel. You need to recompile your kernel with only the hardwa
Don't see the issue (Score:2)
Take my iBook, for example. I just sleep it, and when I open the lid and hit a key, it wakes up. It can go days before it needs to be recharged. I put it to sleep and bag-stash it before going thru airport security, and if they want to see it work, I just wake it up...bam...done.
I think more work should be done towards improving sleep-state longevity and run-time rather than towards r
Startup Programs (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Startup Programs (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, it would help if people didn't like them so much, or at least tolerate them.
Look at Steam. I hate Steam with a passion on principle, because Valve forced people to install it, and it always ran on the computer even when Valve's games did not. To this day, I still have not installed HL2 or the Orange Box on my system, and I have remained very vocal about the forced installation of background tasks. Other people complained at first, but now, all I hear from people is how awesome Steam is and how they love buying things off it, and I should shut up about it. The fact that it is there all the time, constantly doing things in the background just doesn't phase them. After all, they can simply blame their 3-minute boot times on Microsoft.
What about all the "helper" programs? Every time I install some kind of driver, there's about 3-5 system services that get added to my system. When I search for information about these services, the web pages I encounter tell me that the services are not required, but that they enhance performance, so I shouldn't disable them. Excuse me? Enhance performance? In what respect? What if I only use that part of my system once a day, but it adds about 75-100MB of data to my swap file on startup? If not done correctly, pre-caching can seriously slow down a computer, and I see that every day when I fix other peoples' computers. And yet, other people tell me I shouldn't complain about it?
I stopped using Google Chrome when I found out that it installed an automatic updater with no way to disable it, short of hunting it down and deleting the main executable. Without deleting the file, Chrome just put it right back into active use again. Chrome also used to write about 1.5 gigabytes to my hard drive every time I started it up. Why? Well, that's part of the safe browsing initiative, where the browser downloads and installs a record of bad web sites. What if I have one of those flash drives? Will an app that writes several gigs of data to the drive every day wear it out prematurely? Do the commercial developers care?
No, they don't... because home users don't care, either, or at least they don't know any better.
Meanwhile, people still ask me to fix their computers all the time, and the only thing I can do to keep boot times under a minute is disable half their software. Then, their friends tell them to buy a Mac, and all the performance problems will go away. Is that why my Mac only has Apple software installed and takes 1.5 minutes to boot, whereas my XP system boots in 18 seconds with Apache and MySQL in the background?
Blame OS bloat and feature creep (Score:5, Interesting)
My later Amigas typically had a boot time of 10 seconds. Full blown AmigaOS on an internal HD on the A3000. I miss them dearly.
We've managed to stav off the usefulness of moore's law by creating the world's worst software to run on them.
It's not fair to judge modern systems with those older ones however; we ask a lot more of our software and our GUI's than we once did. But there is no excuse in the way that windows configures itself by default, it sets itself up for failure by having a re-sizable swap partition on the main OS partition.
When I install Windows on a new PC, I always create 3 partitions: An inner partition of 5 - 10 GB for a fixed size swap file only, then an OS partition, then an applications partition, and defrag regularly. I can keep my machines going for many years without much performance degradation in this manner.
Even if you are scrupulous, bad software and bad uninstall jobs will eventually bloat out your system a little bit.
A little common sense goes a long way, unfortunately those who do not deal with computers for a living aren't going to know these little tips and tricks, and will continue to be frustrated. OS manufacturers, in particular windows need to set up a default OS install for success, not failure. Software manufacturers need to create very clean installs and uninstall routines. Unfortunately this is not always possible in the OS environment. It's a joint effort.
The tin-foil hatters will think that M$ is doing this on purpose so people will feel compelled to upgrade more frequently, but I don't really give them that much conniving intelligence.
--Mike
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Err, re-sizable swap FILE, sorry. typo.
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"The tin-foil hatters will think that M$ is doing this on purpose so people will feel compelled to upgrade more frequently, but I don't really give them that much conniving intelligence."
Oh, it gets better... check this out.
MSDN Magazine, October 2008, page 150, "End Bracket"
Josh Phillips, a Program Manager on the MS Parallel Computing Platform Team, actually is advocating wasting CPU cycles. As in, if you have multiple sources of data, go ahead and fetch two or three and just use the first one that comes
under 15 seconds? (Score:2)
Wait, what MS system current boots under 15 seconds?
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It would - it has no pesky drivers or apps to slow it down.
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Har har, he made a joke! It would be funny if it had even a small ring of truth to it, except he has no idea what he's talking about! Vista 64 runs all 32 bit applications Vista 32 can. The only thing it's missing is 16-bit support (and qq over that, really), and for most computers (that don't have ridiculous off brand hardware) you can get all the drivers you need.
But don't let me or the facts get in the way of bashing "M$" for the "lulz", am I right?
Standby doesn't waste that much electricity (Score:2, Informative)
Standy on desktop doesn't waste that much electricity (10-15Watt) compared to a power off mode (5Watt). With the newer power supplys, for the past 10 or so years, a powered off computer still consumes power as it needs to keep that power on/off button hot (12v or 5v, not sure). The older power supplies, the power button was a true 110/220V switch. To achieve that now, you have to use the switch in the back where the power supply is..
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I recently measured a bunch of PCs around my house, actually. Distressingly, my Mac Pro takes 40W when "turned off"!
Personally, the desktop PC gets turned off at the wall overnight. The server obviously doesn't, but it was designed top to bottom to be power efficient (and idles at around 30-40W). The laptop is my fast-on system.
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>Distressingly, my Mac Pro takes 40W when "turned off"!
Yeah, since I normally have around 5 computers in my work room I've installed a master power switch. That switch paid for itself in half a year by power savings alone.
It's psychological (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not like the user will be doing anything for the first minute after the computer starts anyway. It's merely the act of waiting and not being able to interact while it boots. Once it boots up people will still *do nothing* of importance on it.
It's psychological - the user wants to see progress. Even if it boots up and shows the desktop quickly, the user will have to wait until all the startup programs finish loading. If they can double-click on IE (oops, Firefox, since we're on Slashdot) sooner they will be happy, even if the system is only semi-responsive.
PCs, TVs, dvd players, blu-ray players. (Score:2)
Do people REALLy care about boot times? (Score:2)
I mean, with hibernation and standby modes, outside the need to restart for some sort of update--why even shutdown?
It just all seems pointless to me. I don't find ANY OS's boot times slow enough to start tinkering with ways to make it faster. Even Vista on this laptop was well under a minute. And that's to "usable". XP and Linux are maybe a few seconds faster. Is there really some use for it booting in 20 seconds vs. maybe 30?
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When your computer is in standby mode it is still using power.
In a company of hundreds of PCs, this adds up to a considerable, and completely unnecessary, power drain. It costs the company and it puts CO2 into the atmosphere.
Anyway, I reckon hoping for 15 second boot time shows a real lack of ambition. Why can't we have 1 second boot times?
AHCI Firmware (Score:4, Insightful)
I just bought a new PC, and was absolutely dismayed when I activated the AHCI (SATA) firmware to discover it added about ten full seconds to the boot time. I have no idea what it performs during that time (some kind of calibration? I sure hope it's not a stupid just-to-be-safe timeout).
Conversely, I have desactivated IDE support, and it has now become very hard to enter the BIOS since the initial screen goes by so fast. I get about a quarter of a second to press the right key.
The usability of the BIOS is exactly the same as it was ten years ago. It's a shame no progress has occurred in that area in such a long time. I want it to go as fast as possible when everything is settled, but I also want to be able to pause and look at everything step by step while I am installing hardware. Apparently no one cares about that. :(
Power Modes (Score:2)
3 stages to tackle.. (Score:5, Informative)
Yup, it has always irritated me that the faster my system gets the more I need to wait for it..
There are IMHO 3 levels to this:
1) BIOS boot. Why the hell do I need to wait for this? I don't need the advertising, thanks, and a state check is BS if it worked before - flag and repeat. The maximum allowed delay should be to show a 2 sec message "Press F1 to enter BIOS or re-scan" - and even that one should be able to switch off. I recall reading something about an Open Source BIOS having to be slowed down because it was ready before the disks had spun up - yes please!
2) OS boot. The actual core OS is again something that, once stable, changes very little. Or so goes the theory, with the incredible amount of patching going on in Windows there is indeed a need for re-scan. But that again is something you do once, then skip the proooooooooooooooooobing for something that *may* be there but doesn't respond in teh half century timeout that it has been given. I can recall something called TurboDOS for the Apple ][ that was a good 3x faster, mainly because someone had brought the timeouts back to something sane.. What I find particularly offensive is the Microsoft marketing department forcing a visible desktop that makes it appear the machine is ready, where any enterprise build will take more than it takes to get a coffee before it is finally really is, even after defragging the disk. That's at least something I find less of an issue with Linux. However, these days there is an awful lot of crap that has to be loaded for no apparent reason - maybe time to lift the covers and go back to basics?
On the Linux front an observation aside: once upon a time, Linux booted in seconds even when the then Worries for Workgroups was already starting to get obese. This speed advantage no longer exists other than that a ready desktop really IS ready :-(
3) App level boot. Once the OS is live, all these other gadgets become alive. There is a whole raft of things that sit and watch for events these days, and most of it does so surreptitiously. Picasa shows a logo and tells you it's watching for events, but the iTunes crap hides, ditto for the Apple update. Once upon a time you could look in Windows "startup" and look at what actually loaded, but that was obviously too visible and useful and could -oh shudder- allow the customer to kill off the things they didn't want. These days, only Logitech and OpenOffice do it as intended, the rest all sits under the radar - motives?
ANY program setting up some form of monitoring should be visible, and offer the advanced user a way to kill it off. I want iTunes only to play music, and I will start it up myself hen I need it to sync - that is a choice I should be able to make. Sure, make it idiot proof but for God's sake leave an option for the non-idiots to control it (and bloody stop trying to shove Safai down my throat with every down, sorry, 'up'grade). And I don't recall ever giving permission for the Apple Update program so where did that come from? I think that is in principle a breach of computing laws to install software without authorisation..
There are so many apps that start up a background process for updates that it's a miracle there's bandwidth left for getting any work done, and starting an app starts off some more. Apple iTunes, Firefox -and each extension thereof-, Thunderbird -ditto-) - the moment you start them the hunt for updates begins. "Stable" has been replaced by "perpertual beta" - and we know who started that (yes Redmond, it's you). I can recall where especially an OS patch was A Big Deal. The fact that someone does this monthly (and now doesn't) should not blind you to the fact that it once was an exceptional event rather than rule.
And then there is the way network events are treated: synchronous. Start Outlook and watch the system die while it waits for some sign of life from the server (and then continues this throughout the day). Watch a DNS lookup freeze a system because the netwo
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Your breakdown is correct: I'm glad I scrolled down instead of starting my own thread.
* BIOS boot) This takes time because it's in a minimal feature mode, BIOS RAM is quite expensive to deal with. And it's looking for a load of ancient cruft you don't have installed. BIOS's are some of the buggiest, nasty, proprietary, vendor specific, burdened with workarounds crap you will ever see. The fix is simple: open up the BIOS and clean out all the stuff you don't need on that motherboard. LinuxBIOS does _exactly_
Fantastic quote to go with this (Score:2, Funny)
"there is something deeply wrong when text editing on a 3.6 ghz processor is anything but instantaneous." --John Carmack
Usually the AV software the extends the time (Score:5, Insightful)
What I have noticed is that what is one of the major culprits in long boot times is antivirus software starting up and doing its integrity checks. Reduce this, and you will reduce times perhaps by five minutes on some machines. However, with Windows, I doubt AV makers could do it without reducing security though.
Boot times are irrelevant (Score:2)
Boot times of 5 minutes wouldn't really bother me all that much - I reboot *maybe* once a month, other than that my computer is either on or suspended (and it only takes two seconds to return to life from suspend). The easy solution is make sure that Windows defaults to suspend/hibernate rather than shut down, since the normal user generally sticks with the default settings.
The things that matter to me are:
Cheaper hardware
More efficient software
Major technology improvements
I'm not at all an environmentalis
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The most power-efficient PC is one that is switched off and unplugged at the mains.
Perhaps more people would do this if when they switched it back on it was ready to use right then.
The sole reason most people leave their PCs on is because they want that 5-second email check to take 5 seconds, not five minutes.
When rebooting, shutdown time is important (Score:5, Insightful)
What really gets me is not just the boot time but the shutdown time. Especially because I often reboot (shutdown time + boot time).
When I tell my PC to shut down, all it really needs to do is make sure that no files are currently being written to disk, force a dismount of all drives, and then cut the power. Everything else is bad programming, as far as I can see. Why does the network have to shut down? Why do a whole load of separate processes have to be given signals? Why does KDE need time to save settings (it should have already saved them in real time)?
If the computer is not doing anything, a clean shutdown should take no more than a second, and yet it can take much longer.
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I hate having to wait for the confirm shutdown dialog. Gnome displays the dialog but it defaults to doing the shutdown in 60 seconds so you can walk away. Nice.
286 + DOS (Score:2, Funny)
Useless (Score:2)
Useless and a waste of development. Just put the computer to sleep, and it boots in 2 seconds. Why bother wasting time on this?
my 5 second startup (Score:4, Interesting)
I got sick of these outrageous boot times a long time ago.
here is how i fixed it:
I have an old IBM PS/1 that i picked up in the early 90's. (for the kids: 386 processor, 2 megs of RAM)
When I turn it on, the system is usable in about 5-10 seconds.
I can have a word processor open AND be typing away happily within 15 seconds of hitting that button.
now it takes me a minute to load my OS, and another 20 seconds before my word processor is usable
what the hell happened?
8 bit (Score:4, Interesting)
My Sinclair ZX Spectrum is ready in less than 2 seconds. Now I have made an ethernet card for it, I can be on IRC within 5 seconds of power up!
OSses should sleep/hibernate by default, like Macs (Score:3, Interesting)
Forget computers, how about everyday electronics (Score:4, Interesting)
Why does it take the Wii a good 30 seconds to start playing a game from the time you push the power button? (I'm including in here the time it takes to acknowledge the safety warning and click through the Wii menu.) I'm sure that the 360 and PS3 are just as bad.
And (probably unique to the Wii), why do I have to see one or two more safety warnings every time the game loads?
And (definitely not unique to the Wii), why do I have to watch multiple studio logos before I even get to the start screen. The record that I found, was one game that had EIGHT studio ads!!
But, how about DVD players. My player takes somewhere in the 20 second range to load a disc and then I have usually a few (usually) skippable ads followed by 10-15 seconds of unskippable menu animations.
I'm still holding out on Blu-Ray because one recent review of a new Sony player was talking about how fast it was - 1 minute to start up - 1 minute to load the disc. That's two full minutes before even the ads start to play!
I kinda miss the 80's, when you stuck your VHS tape in and the movie started right away. Any ads? Then just rewind back only to the start of the movie and you'll never see them again. You took Super Mario Bros and put it in your Nintendo. In under five seconds, you're asked if you wanted to play with one or two people. After you make that choice, within a second you're playing the game.
Re:Forget computers, how about everyday electronic (Score:5, Funny)
My Final Fantasy XI box boots in about 12 seconds (Score:3, Informative)
Win98SE FTW!
Lets go back to ROM (Score:3, Interesting)
Faster Boot Times.. (Score:4, Insightful)
On a modern system, 98 boots up in less than 10 seconds.
Vista, almost a full minute plus.
98 can do almost everything Vista can do (If Microsoft even bothered to make the effort,) so what's the difference?
DRM, HUGE and horribly unoptimized and sloppy code, and last but not least, crap drivers written by third parties.
The last problem will fix itself as devs get used to the way Vista handles everything. the first and second will not go away anytime soon.
If computer makers REALLY wanted boot times under 30 seconds, they'd drop Microsoft altogether, because there's no way a default Vista install will take less than 45 seconds.
MinuetOS, OTOH, with proper tweaking, boots in under 3 seconds (under 5 seconds by default options.) and I've been able to get everything working under it (minus games and MS software, of course.)
Most of the problem lies with the OS manufacturer. Eliminate that factor and you're set to speedy computing.
5 Seconds. No more (Score:3, Interesting)
"It's not about booting faster, it's about booting in 5 seconds."
http://lwn.net/Articles/299088/ [lwn.net]
http://lwn.net/Articles/299546/ [lwn.net]
or a bit more involved:
TCCBOOT compiles and boots a Linux kernel in 15 seconds
http://lwn.net/Articles/108341/ [lwn.net]
Eight Seconds for MS-DOS (Score:3, Interesting)
Linux suggestion: save ASCII config file timestamps and corresponding kernel structures. If the ASCII config file is unchanged, then reload the internal structure without any recomputation.
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Re:Vendors should try not pre-installing crap then (Score:3, Insightful)
Having extra stuff installed is not a problem per se, at least not on linux or osx...
Having extra stuff loaded at startup is an issue...
Having extra stuff which cannot be removed is an issue...
On windows, merely installing something typically adds crap to the registry which has to be loaded anyway, even if you never use the program itself, there are often update daemons loaded at startup because there's no other way to keep arbitrary apps up to date and uninstall programs work on the principle of trusting t
Re:Why don't more people use standby? (Score:5, Interesting)
> I've been using standby/sleep extensively on my desktops and laptops for the last 10 years,
> and I still can't understand why people with a modern machine don't use standby.
Because it still doesn't work for everyone. I tried it a month ago, followed the instructions in the suspend HOWTO, made that suspend script and ran it. The machine suspended, but didn't resume - everything spun up, but looked dead. Sure, it might be easy to fix, but doing so would entail poring through hundreds of forums posts written by clueless idiots for that one little bit of information, followed by dozens of reboots for test-fail-retry cycles. I might get around to it, when I have a month to spare. Many things on Linux [don't] work like that...