Windows 8 To Feature 'Fast Startup Mode' 287
New story submitter CSHARP123 writes "Microsoft has posted details about a Windows 8 feature that is a hybrid between cold booting and waking up from a hibernated state. This feature is called fast startup mode. Gabe Aul, director of program management in Windows, explains: '[A]s in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk. If you’re not familiar with hibernation, we’re effectively saving the system state and memory contents to a file on disk (hiberfil.sys) and then reading that back in on resume and restoring contents back to memory. Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested).' The post contains a video as well, which shows Windows starting up in less than 10 seconds."
Re:will they have a real reboot (Score:4, Informative)
RTFA and find out..
Hint... The answer is yes. But note that they do re-intialize drivers even in the hybrid boot, so that takes care of a majority of kernel level issues
Re:Time to Usable (Score:4, Informative)
Now if you are part of an enterprise domain, it seemingly takes even longer.
And if you have a corporate standard image with policies etc pushed out on each boot....
On a cold boot, I can wander off, make a cup of tea, come back and it may just be ready. On a request for a reboot after a system update (and why it has to reboot after a change is yet another gripe) I could walk into town, go to the supermarket, buy a box of biscuits, queue up at the checkout, walk back and still be waiting for a usable system.
Strange that all that downtime x the number of users never really appears in TCO calculations -- I guess that's what meetings were invented for (so we'd have something to do without access to the IT infrastructure
...and people ask me why I prefer Linux !
Re:Reality, the theory (Score:3, Informative)
I'm confused, are you recommending we buy a second computer to use while booting our primary one?
Story fail.