Remember back in the day when the Microsoft peeps were showing off Windows XP and its drastically decreased boot and
resume startup times? Remember how blown away everyone was when Bill hit a button and your computer sprang back to life
from suspend? But then Windows sclerosis sets in, and you’re lucky if your machine boots in six minutes or shuts down
in two—so Microsoft’s taking it back to the old school in Windows Vista, which they’re claiming will
boot powered off in two to three seconds. Of course, what they mean by “boot” in this case could be pretty
much anything (hell, we can’t even get past our BIOS in two to three seconds), but if nothing else at least they’re
setting a tall order for making Vista a little more friendly to work with.
As mentioned in the quote above, we wouldn’t know for sure now what Microsoft’s “boot” means. Windows Vista supposedly processes login scripts and startup programs and services in the background so you can start working right away. If that’s the case, 2 to 3 seconds sounds very possible. But wouldn’t our computers slow to a crawl until everything is processed?
Maybe someone who is beta-testing Vista now can give some comments?
Originally by Ryan Block from Engadget on September 27, 2005, 7:20pm
January 9th, 2006 at 8:29 am
I’ve read other articles on Vista before, and it seems as if it might actually be able to follow through with this; the only drawback being the minimum system requirements needed to run this beast. From what I’ve heard, the minimums are going to be in the area of a 2GB memory block, a 2.2GHz processor, and at at least a minimum of a 128MB video card (not that we all don’t already have one).
I’d like to see them prove their claims, though. 2 to 3 seconds to load even Win98 on the above system — and be ready to process on the fly — would take a miracle. Unless good ol’ Bill is a God,
It ain’t happening.
February 21st, 2006 at 12:47 pm
there are some intel proessors with an instant boot up function. if i can remember only what the feature is called…it was on a pentium d processor i saw this feature by the way.
February 21st, 2006 at 12:51 pm
[Comment ID #1491 Will Be Quoted Here]
I believe you meant those instant-on buttons that are beginning to appear on numerous notebooks. What those do is boot you to a dedicated environment just for running your favorite MP3, videos, etc. So normal bootup is still required for, say, word processing.
February 21st, 2006 at 1:11 pm
yup youre correct leon. thats the one i was taking about. i guess it was a penitum laptop with the “instant on button”.
April 12th, 2006 at 9:30 am
I prefer a stable OS X to boot in about 25 seconds, than a crapy Windows OS booting in whatever time they can make it boot.
April 12th, 2006 at 5:49 pm
Here here.
I like my [heavily customized] XP. I’m not about to upgrade just yet; I’ll be a couple years.
Sorry Bill. Money stays in my pocket.
October 17th, 2006 at 1:32 pm
I have Vista it does boot up in 3 seconds..
Vista is great but there need to be compatibility with older drivers as well..
EX: i have a midi keyboard controller, it uses windoes xp.. the developers haven’t yet made a driver that will work in Vista..
same goes for my tv card.
spex:
Athlon Xp 2400+ oc’d
256mb Geforce FX 5600+ oc’d
2gb of pc 3200 ram
k7n2 deluxe mobo..
over 600 gb of hard drive space.
still runs super fast.
February 10th, 2007 at 11:53 am
Yea, In Betas, people screamed about how much memory this monster beast. The OS shouldn’t be the computer! It should be just the building block for what you really want to do… use it! I blogged this issue. It’s insane. I can’t sell this to someone. It’s has no user end functionality http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendID=62875138
Dell, HP, and them can make these $549. specials and have heart not to tell the customer “It will work”, but I can’t. I too nice.