Is it just me, cause i could swear i heard this crap before from M$ ?! They said the same thing about Windows ME !

Adi

the pertinent question is, how many regular (that is to say, non-techy) users are just fine with making a stability-for-speed trade-off? the reason windows systems bloat so massively over time is that every single software designer, from microsoft to google to security vendors, etc, use start-up entries to reduce the chance for glitches or user error.

think about this: a techy may know very well to only keep the active protection element of an anti-virus application, while discarding the rest (graphical interface, automatic updates, etc) but what would happen to regular users if that particular installation method became the standard? they would: #1. not update their av solution manually, leaving themselves exposed #2. not know how to access various av functions, because their beloved icons are mia from the taskbar.

same thing but on a much grander scale applies to os design. we may know how to manually edit which services, dll & startup entries we want, but most regular end-users do not, and microsoft needs to design for regular end-users--therefore, bloat.

don't get me wrong--i loathe vista with the burning passion of a thousand suns and will very likely not use it at all. i wish that microsoft had the presence of mind to offer an "i know exactly what the fuck i'm doing" checkbox during the setup process which would permanently do away with such atrocities as UAC, aero & other crimes against decent performance. but i certainly understand WHY they choose to do otherwise.

btw, this dovetails nicely with Microsoft's pathetic last-minute logo-less Vista boot (when booting Vista, you only see the loading bar and copyright) as an effort to bring load times down. Real elegant, guys.

/troll-mode?

I just checked it yesterday night, my system boots in 29 secs, well i would not consider it bad.

4GB ram and 4GB Ready boost is all i give to my Quad core to play with.

I don't see why a boot is even necessary in most cases.

Seems like all the operating system really needs is the equivalent of a Hibernate file that checksums the file against a quick scan of the core hardware, then loads the default system image instead of going through a complete boot routine. The system can then do a scan for any changes in USB peripherals, etc. while the user is already accessing the computer.

If drivers or core system files are ever changed, or if the checksum fails, or if the system fails to load correctly after attempting to load the system image, the system will go through an actual boot routine, verify successful boot, then write a new system image for the next time around.

Windows already has the necessary capabilities scattered throughout features like Hibernation, System Restore, and WGA. Someone just needs to link them together.

Pointless, wake up from sleep is 2-4 seconds and wastes around 1-2 watts.

Vista's sleep has no performance degradation over time even after months.

I think anyone who sits in front of their screen for 15-30 seconds to boot up and any amount of time to wait till it shuts down is wasting their life away.... just push the sleep button.

Hmm, I define boot time to be the time until the desktop environment is usable.

For my work laptop (Core 2 Duo @2GHz, Dell D820) in Windows XP, that is around 5 minutes even if I log in as soon as the login screen is usable.

If they get that down to 15 seconds (even 15 seconds to login screen, then 15 seconds to *working, usable* desktop, then I'd be impressed.

Do people really still care how fast their computers boot? I'd be more interested in how long it can stay on and how much power it'll consume. I'd also like to see more information encrypted that goes in and out of it as well.

Windows ME booted much faster than 98SE. Considering how much it crashed, that was a good thing. ;)

I'm running 64bit Vista and it boots fast enough for me. My Mobo takes about 5 seconds before it even starts loading from HD, then it's about another 35 seconds and I've Password prompt. From there 10 seconds after I'm ready to start gaming (that's waiting for Steam). But I agree with most posters saying it's the crappy 3rd party software that's either a service or in the Startup that slows down the boot more then Windows.

That said I'll normally us my Laptop to do the day to day stuff. But it's on 24/7 but just suspended. Reboot about once every 3 weeks. I've found a longs as you don't go install lots of junk on XP it's a good responsive OS.

Boot speed is the least of my worries, it's not like windows is BSODing like it used to.

After releasing Windows XP ME (aka Vista), I think everyone is going to take this with a grain of salt.

*Note: By grain of salt, I mean a grain roughly 4 cubic miles in size

I don't think it matters what they say anymore. The next version of windows will be bigger, slower, and rely on new hardware to make performance acceptable.

User Account Control

Windows would like to boot in 15 seconds

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What annoys me is Windows boots up, sits at the login screen and stops thrashing, I'd love an option where it continues to load stuff in the background at the login screen while typing a password in.

I'd like to see also the network part being smarter, it should manually set a static ip to the same ip it previously had on last boot - then do a DHCP check, if it finds a new ip, then update it but otherwise it's just saved time (apparently if you set a static IP it saves some boot time)

Also, according to one of the TR reviewers, optical drives somehow slow the Windows load time as well?

The whole thing should be multi-threaded too - god damn it takes too long to boot even a monster PC :/

MS has their priories mixed up.

Why bother with boot time? It is entirely I/O bounded these days. I remember when it was clearly CPU-bound however that was like 10 years ago.

Anyway, ~1 minute boot time is plenty fast for any user and system expect for mission critical servers that are recovering from an unexpected event.

My boot time is mostly consumed by BIOS for my SATA controllers.

In summary, more time on optimizing and stability... less time on buggy new features. Not going to get that, because always need a hook to sell a new OS, but we can dream.

I used to see BeOS boot and it's pretty fast.
That's almost a decade ago.

Meadows, people are allowed not to like Vista and MS for that matter - you don't have to try to denounce or debunk ever such post.

No matter the boot time, any antivirus software will slow down the system. Remember Microsoft saying that Vista would boot faster then XP long ago? I wonder how this will really boot up.

I think boot times would be held down radically if they did something about the "stay-resident" loaders, updaters and spyware of so much of modern software.

Adobe, Real, Sun, Google, Microsoft, and so many others have now taken it upon themselves to put totally unnecessary programs in startup, or to create burdensome services as part of startup but better hidden, that I sometimes wonder whose machine I have on my desk. Nothing that Microsoft does with Windows 7 will make a difference if they don't separate that garbage from startup.

They should make it 7 seconds boot up...

I think the 15 second boot up is with reference to Core i7 system

both have 7, perhaps it was designed to use the features of new processor.

Of Course! Boot Times are important for my diet!
Everytime the pc takes more than 15 seconds it makes wanna go to the kitchen anf fetch whatever i can find...

MS: just fix, finally, after a decade of promising, the requirement to reboot so often. ESPECIALLY with IE! Good FSM I've never reboot for FF, and it patches in like 5 seconds.

I think Microsoft is too knee-deep in their legacy mud. They should dig themselves out and redesign a functional, slim kernel that doesn't have all the bloat and round-about ways of doing things that the current Windows versions do.

"Our perspective on this is simple; if a service is not absolutely required, it shouldn't be starting and a trigger should exist to handle rare conditions so that the service operates only then."

You are kidding me.

Is this 2008? How many years of development and $$$$$$$$billion have they thrown at Windows over the years, and only now with Windows 7 are they bothering to do something that the technically literate have been doing manually since Windows 95.

30second boot times in 2010, when we'll have 32core nehalems and 500MB/s SSDs... geez, don't set the bar too high or anything.

We are up to Windows #7 and they are just now realizing that they need to work on Boot times?

Dont get me wrong, I am glad that they are doing that, but come on, this should have been something that they shoudl have worked on a long time ago.

Who gives a rat's ass about boot times? It's called Sleep mode, people.

Use it.

It may be loathed, but other operating systems don't boot much different either - if there is a difference, it's insignificant enough.
That notwithstanding, you hardly ever need to boot at all, with sleep mode being a very good exclusive alternative to desktop machines, and for portable computers too, in some cases at least.

I've been following the blog also.

To be quite honest, I can't understand why people make such a fuss over boot times. Unless its like a five minute booting process, the difference between 30 seconds and 1 minute isn't really going to kill you. I've never had a problem waiting for my computer to boot up.

And to be honest the boot/load time on my laptop with Vista is faster than both my comps back home running XP.