Microsoft Considers "Instant On" Windows 440
Barence writes "In what might be a glimpse of things to come in Windows 7, Microsoft is asking customers whether they would be interested in a new 'Instant-on' version of Windows. 'We would like your feedback on a new concept,' the Microsoft survey states. 'The Instant On experience is different from "Full Windows" because it limits what activities you can do and what applications you can have access to.' Sounds interesting but hardly new: Asus and Dell have produced laptops that provide swift access to apps and data using Linux subsystems."
Nothing new here.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Full windows? (Score:2, Interesting)
The concept is called 'Instant On'. 'Instant On' takes your computer from being completely powered down or 'turned off' to being usable for a few specific activities in a very short amount of time."
Glad they clarified that powered down and turned off are the same thing. S3, anyone? Small power draw and "instant on" with "full features." I wonder if instant on will be (much) faster than resuming from hibernate. It would be hard to justify an instant on for limited features unless it's a whole lot faster than resuming from hibernate.
"Obviously the systems that are greater than 60 seconds have something we need to dramatically improve- whether these are devices, networking, or software issues."
So, instant on will shave it down to... 30 seconds? Also have to wonder if this will be standard in 7 or something you get to pay extra for.
Re:Nothing new here....Headlights. (Score:1, Interesting)
Easy Lazy Instant-On/Off... (Score:5, Interesting)
Boot the system. Now snapshot a memory image (a'la hybernate).
Now for "instant on", set up the page table and start running, and in the background, lazily swap in the rest of the memory. Anything you need immediately gets paged from disk, and the rest of the state gets swept up over the next 30 seconds.
Also, in the background, do "lazy write" as well: Any page that is stable for >X seconds but the disk is still active, write it out, so that going back to sleep (rehibernating) can be fast as well.
Next Windows should be Windows Verde (Score:5, Interesting)
The green os. 12-18% better power savings for 'always-on' desktops. Sell it to the CFO, not the CTO, and leverage half the marketing budget to the Windows Green campaign. Don't bother with other features or capabilities. They are unneeded, and do nothing to drive adoption or deployment. (Sorry, feature teams.)
Re:Uptime... (Score:5, Interesting)
Because I have a secondary monitor to the left of my Microsoft Windows Vista laptop. Why is that an issue?
- Because after undocking, Microsoft Outlook insists on opening on that (non-existent) monitor.
- Because after re-docking, Microsoft Windows insists on logically placing my external monitor to the RIGHT of my Laptop, and swapping the screens that the start bar and sidebar show up on.
- Because after undocking, carrying my laptop to the conference room and plugging it into the projector, all kinds of weird things happen.
That's why I shutdown daily.
Re:If you wanted an uptime contest... (Score:4, Interesting)
My Ubuntu machine has uptimes that are about 30-90 days, which is entirely based on new kernel releases. I've never had an unintended reboot (e.g. from a freeze or crash).
(Yes, there are methods [slashdot.org] of updating the kernel without rebooting... but most people with massive uptimes seem to achieve it not by using these tricks but rather by not touching the box.)
Re:Uptime... (Score:5, Interesting)
System Up Time: 0 Days, 21 Hours, 32 Minutes, 58 Seconds
Windows Update :( Not "off" but restart.
Hm. I run both Windows and Mac. I can't remember the last time I did any update to a Mac that didn't require a restart. It's really pretty annoying.
Windows has gotten much better about not requiring restarts for updates. A huge change from its Windows 95/98 and NT days.
Re:Next Windows should be Windows Verde (Score:5, Interesting)
You are forgetting the benefits of instant login machines. Instant on and instant login saves 5-15 minutes per day of user time. GEICO used to insist that their employees were logged in and ready to take calls when their shifts started. This got them a class-action lawsuit over the non-paid work and overtime accrued by their phone reps. (are your company's practices as unfair?)
Re:My opinion (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Uptime... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:If you wanted an uptime contest... (Score:2, Interesting)
Another thing to consider is some faulty HW doesn't get noticed until boot time.
In the case of certain types of disc failure, that is a good reason not to power down a server unless forced to. Note that I say "power down" and not "reboot" as rebooting doesn't usually spin down the platters. I've had long running machines survive reboots fine but lose a disk or two if forcibly powered down. Ike remnants took us down for a week and I had quite the fun time rebuilding a raid array that failed one of members proper and the designated hotspare. Prior to the outage, that machine had been up for 6 months.
I'm not going to get into the habit of powering down servers just to see if the disks will spin back up or not. The moral of this little story is that the platters of a disk may well be fine but the mechanicals driving them may not do the correct things if they have to start from a cold state.
With the cost of power (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Finally some progress... (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't you dare hit the "Media Direct" button!
It'll hose your MBR!
I think newer versions (3 and up) don't do this, since they don't use the HPA method anymore.
There are guides out there describing how to dual boot those Vostro laptops. You can make a hackintosh on those guys fairly easily, as well. XP/OSX, XP/Linux, Linux/OSX, whatever you want.
Main power button boots into one, Media Direct button boots into the other. No more choosing things from a bootloader!
I would LOVE to see motherboards (and cases) support multtiple power buttons. Hell, bring back the turbo button!
Re:My opinion (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny but true. I turn on my computer. Go start a cup of coffee in the brew machine. Come back and type in my password. Go finish making my coffee. Chit-chat with some of my co-workers. When I return to my desk the Windows desktop is finally responsive even though it appeared about 2 minutes previously. Finally I load Outlook and that takes another two minutes.
So, 5-10 minutes of my day every day is spent waiting for Windows. That's 40 hours a year. Microsoft owes my company 1 week of my salary. If they were forced to pay, they'd have to raise their prices for windows and office a whole hell of a lot to be profitable.
Granted some of this is a function of hardware, login scripts that MS has no control over, etc, etc, etc, but it is a fun thought experiment.
Re:Easy Lazy Instant-On/Off... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, if Windows hibernation operated anything like Linux hibernation, it would work a lot better.
For reference, Linux hibernation doesn't bother writing non-writable memory pages to the hibernation file. So the hibernation file is much smaller compared to Windows. (Which is why Linux can hibernate to a swap file.)
But this is because Linux can 'swap' from the original executable file into memory. So when it unhibernates, it 'unswaps' most of the programs from their original location, only loading the data segments from the swap file.
Of course, a good portion of the program is already in swap, so what actually happens is that all data segments not in the swap file are written to it, with as much executable segments overwritten as needed to fit those in. It is very very fast.
As opposed to Windows, which sits down and writes out all of physical memory to another file, and then has to load it all back in.(It might even write out 'clean' memory pages that are already in the swap file and unchanged since they were loaded back in memory, but I bet MS is smarter than that.)
Granted, Linux still has to, eventually, load all the programs into memory too, but it can load them in via 'swap', which is fairly invisible to the end user.
Re:My opinion (Score:3, Interesting)
What are these "users" doing posting on Slashdot?
1. Trying to learn more about computers. I know, I know, /. is about claiming you know more than you do, not learning. I'm also coming to realize also that although people here can come up with a fix to any computer issue, it usually is much more of a hassle than the issue, only works in theory, and even then only under specific circumstances (namely, it might be able to work for the angry IT guy who suggested it, but if your machine is configured differently it won't, and by the way you're an idiot for not having X Y and Z)
2. More importantly, keeping up to date on actual important news, IE from the science, games, politics, or other (coughidlecough) sections.
Why can't we have both? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why should people have to choose between instantly on and fully functional? Can't Microsoft be ambitious enough to aim to make windows boot fast? This is like they're giving up on that as if it's just not possible, and instead offer some half-way compromise.
Re:My opinion (Score:3, Interesting)
Join the military. Our networks push so much junk onto clients, it makes Core 2 Duos crawl.
I've seen boot/OS load times on clean installs go from ~1 minute to 10 minutes (after logging onto the domain). And I'm not exaggerating; I timed it.