Boot Windows Vista In Four Seconds 326
arcticstoat writes "Asus' budget motherboard wing, ASRock, claims that it's found a way to load a clean boot of Windows from a full shut down in just four seconds, using its new Instant Boot technology. The technology takes advantage of the S3 and S4 features of ACPI, which normally enable the Sleep/Standby and Hibernation modes in Windows respectively. However, by calling them at different times in the boot-up and shutdown process, Instant Boot enables you to boot up to your Windows desktop in three to four seconds, even after a proper shut down. Two modes are available; Fast mode, which uses S3 and boots up in around four seconds, and Regular Mode, which uses S4 and apparently takes between 20 and 22 seconds to boot. The advantage of Instant Boot when compared with normal Sleep and Hibernation modes is that you get the advantage of a clean boot of Windows, without what ASRock calls 'accumulated garbage data,' and you also get the security of knowing that you won't lose any data if there's a power cut and you lose AC power. There's also a video of it in action at the link above."
ASRock is not ASUS (Score:5, Informative)
ASRock is not ASUS. Hua Ching, the subsidiary that was spun off from ASUS is not any longer a part of the ASUS organization. See http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2002/11/05/asus-distances-itself-from-asrock-subsidiary [theinquirer.net] for details. There are a number of companies locally and elsewhere that have been pushing cheap ASRock mainboards as being the same quality as ASUS mainboards. We have seen many issues with the ASRock mainboards, both in premature failure and incompatibilities, that we have not seen at all in ASUS mainboards. ASUS has its own low-end set of mainboards and they are much better than the ASRock, from my experience. The sooner this sort of misinformation gets sorted out, the better informed the consumer will be.
Heh... It's using the Hibernate functionality... (Score:5, Informative)
It sounds like all they did was allow you to store a Hibernate to Disk snapshot of your system at startup before anything else gets done- which is technically cheating. ANYTHING can boot up in about 4 or seconds that way. :-D
Re:You can't have both (Score:5, Informative)
Not quite as useful as it seems at first glance... (Score:4, Informative)
What about shutdown? (Score:3, Informative)
Given the flowcharts (not the shiny video that catches your attention first) it appears that instead of shutting down, they simply reboot the system and once it reaches the state where the OS has finished loaded it then goes to sleep or hibernate. Once you power it back on it just returns to the freshly loaded OS.
So it appears that while it starts up faster, you should end up spending more time shutting down (actually rebooting and reloading the OS). You could also do this manually by rebooting Windows and once it gets to the desktop/login screen go into hibernate/sleep.
Re:What about logon? (Score:5, Informative)
Instant Boot will also only work on Windows systems (XP or Vista) with a single-user account and no password protection.
from the article..
Re:My guess as to how it's done... (Score:5, Informative)
This is EXACTLY what it does. The "more images for this article" section at the given link has a flowchart of the process...it's just a reboot and suspend.
Re:S3? S4? What is this of which you speak? (Score:3, Informative)
A lot of us don't actually know what S3 and S4 are.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACPI#Power_States [wikipedia.org]
Re:My guess as to how it's done... (Score:5, Informative)
They answered that "big question" in the article. There are two different options the "super fast" boot mode that does the " boot" in four seconds. And a regular fast boot that takes 22 seconds. The four second super fast one, needs to stay plugged in to maintain state. The slower fast one does not.
I wouldn't recommend swapping out hardware in either case.
Re:S3? S4? What is this of which you speak? (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of us don't actually know what S3 and S4 are.
You will after reading this article... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Heh... It's using the Hibernate functionality.. (Score:5, Informative)
Correct. That is exactly what they do. So they just shift the boot time to be part of the shutdown time, so when you arrive at your computer again, and turn it on, you are just unsuspending it, or are loading an unusually clean hibernation file. This is a very interesting idea, but it is one that doe not need motherboard support. This can be done by the OS alone.
I booted windows a while ago... (Score:1, Informative)
Hmm... I "booted" windows a few weeks ago. Took a little longer than 4 seconds, but i haven't had any windows trouble since...
There's a link with more info here: http://www.ubuntu.com/ [ubuntu.com]
-Taylor
Re:BUT... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:ASRock is not ASUS (Score:4, Informative)
I work at a computer store in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. However, I would like to point out that as far as my comments are concerned, I speak only for myself here, not where I work.
Re:My guess as to how it's done... (Score:5, Informative)
And I don't think it's quite as easy to script, since you'd have to reconfigure how windows works. If you have an inkling of how to do this in a smooth automated fashion, please do tell me.
A shutdown script that places C:\Windows\_reboot_quick_boot as an empty file on the file system when you shutdown, and cancels the shutdown in favor of a reboot ('shutdown -a' on Windows, 'shutdown -c' on Unix).
A boot-time script that runs last and waits about 10 seconds at the log-in screen for keyboard input (and to give the start-up applications a chance to settle, so they don't have to do a lot of work and thrash disk on resume). If it gets keyboard input, it exits. Otherwise, it initiates a hibernate action and then exits. When you resume this hibernate, the program either has exited or is exiting.
Do I get a blow job now? (I'm a Unix kid, these kinds of problems are obvious to me)
Linux vs. Windows Speed boots (Score:5, Informative)
It's been done in 5 seconds..
Doesn't even require a special motherboard, they did it by modifying Fedora on a EEE pc (something not known for it's speed)
And above all the strategy behind the speedy boots are completely different :
- Linux basically Just boots in 5 seconds. In a plain normal fashion. Everytime you push the button, no matter what, the system is up in 5 seconds (well except if you trashed your machine and disk have to be rechecked).
But it's a plain standard boot.
- Whereas, for Windows, ASRock has to resort to abusing the sleep/hibernate system. With the subtle difference is that they are not actually suspending the system to RAM/disk (in order to avoid accumulating garbage, as they say).
They are resuming a special suspended "freshly booted" state.
i.e.: when in fast boot mode, you are not actually booting Windows. You are resuming an image of a "Windows-that-just-got-started" suspend on RAM.
The main implication is that the first time you boot, and after each system update (and you know that, given microsoft's track of security, you're still going to have patches coming often) or any other change that might render the pre-suspended image obsolete, you can't do this. You have to go through a slow boot, rebuild a pre-suspended state, and only after that it'll work.
It's not a standard boot. It's not as robust as a real boot, and frequently it won't work. (not to mention that these pre-suspended image will be the perfect place to inject a vm-based rootkit).
In short : not as useful as you would hope.
Re:Linux vs. Windows Speed boots (Score:2, Informative)
Linux basically Just boots in 5 seconds. In a plain normal fashion... ...Whereas, for Windows, ASRock has to resort to abusing the sleep/hibernate system.
If they've found a way to boot Windows in 4 seconds, nobody other than haters is going to care how it was done. Calling the method an abuse of the hibernation system is as ridiculous as calling Jailbreaking an abuse of an iPod. It's your hardware.
The main implication is that the first time you boot, and after each system update (and you know that, given microsoft's track of security, you're still going to have patches coming often) or any other change that might render the pre-suspended image obsolete, you can't do this. You have to go through a slow boot, rebuild a pre-suspended state, and only after that it'll work.
They only come once a week, at most. Creating the new image can be done in the background after the system restarts, only taking as long as it would take to hibernate the computer. And you don't have to type in a password every time you get a system update.
Re:ASRock is not ASUS (Score:3, Informative)
They've fixed that. The bad caps affected many other manufacturers at the time.
Evidently a Japanese researcher wanted to make a few bucks and sold info on a new cap design that was bought by the Chinese who went out and made millions. Unfortunately they didn't realise that it needed a special dialectric coolant and so many electronics died months later.
As far as Asrock - they still make 487 P4 boards and are common replacements for systems still running that processor.
Occasionally, XP has kernel problems (kernel running at 100%) for no reason during 99% system idle. In my experience it's a memory timing issue and the BIOS should be set on Auto memory timing which sorts it. Otherwise they are fine.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Proper shutdown... (Score:3, Informative)