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Boot Windows Vista In Four Seconds

Posted by timothy on Wednesday November 12, @06:03PM
from the says-them dept.
Windows Hardware
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."
windows hardware yeahright !boot asus
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Firehose:Boot Windows Vista in four seconds by arcticstoat (993717)
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  • Video (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AKAImBatman (238306) * <akaimbatman@NOspaM.gmail.com> on Wednesday November 12, @06:04PM (#25740243) Homepage Journal

    Those guys in the video are having WAY too much fun with their jobs. "Why your computer boot so fast? I must get ASRock motherboard!"

    Now I know why ASUS mobos tend to be so good. They encourage a fun workplace. ;-)

    • Re:Video (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 12, @06:21PM (#25740451)
      Really? I was sure I just learned Asus motherboards are such high quality because their engineers have a lame sense of humor, leading to a diminished social life with more time to devote towards motherboard perfection.

  • ASRock is not ASUS (Score:5, Informative)

    by vwpau227 (462957) * on Wednesday November 12, @06:06PM (#25740265) Homepage

    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.

  • Oh believe me, I'd love to (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 12, @06:09PM (#25740287)

    I'd boot Vista off my work PC in a millisecond if I could

  • Heh... It's using the Hibernate functionality... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Svartalf (2997) on Wednesday November 12, @06:09PM (#25740295) Homepage

    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

  • My guess as to how it's done... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by crt (44106) on Wednesday November 12, @06:11PM (#25740323)

    They never show the shutdown process - my guess is that when you shutdown, it actually reboots, then right after Windows boots it puts it to sleep or hibernate (S3/S4). When you turn it back on, it wakes it and looks like you "just" booted up.
    Not really a bad idea I suppose - moves the boot time from boot to shutdown, when you are less likely to care.
    Of course you can get the same effect yourself by rebooting then just putting your machine to sleep when you want to shutdown. Someone could probably even write a simple software solution for this rather than requiring a whole new motherboard.

    • Re:My guess as to how it's done... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Egotistical Rant (42993) on Wednesday November 12, @06:22PM (#25740465)

      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.

    • Of course you can get the same effect yourself by rebooting then just putting your machine to sleep when you want to shutdown. Someone could probably even write a simple software solution for this rather than requiring a whole new motherboard.

      Hmm. It seems like it'd be really easy to do this with an open source OS. I think I may have just found a nifty little project for this weekend. All it should take is:

      • Add an inittab runlevel (7?) for "shutdown to instant boot".
      • Add an /etc/rc7.d with a script that writes a file that records the fact that we're in "shutdown to instant boot" state, then switches to runlevel 6.
      • Add an init script in late in the normal startup sequence that checks for "shutdown to instant boot" state. If it finds that state, it removes the file and then initiates suspend or hibernate, depending on a configuration option.

      At that point "sudo init 7" should cause your machine to shut down to "instant boot" state. Hitting the power button will then "instant boot" it.

      "sudo init 0" or "sudo init 6" will do a normal shutdown or a normal reboot.

      The final step would be to modify the "shutdown" command to go to runlevel 7 when given some new option, and then to modify the GUI-based shutdown tools to provide the instant-boot option as well, and maybe make it the default. Oh, and maybe modify the ACPI script that's executed when the power button is hit so that the power button does a "shutdown to instant boot" by default.

      Pretty easy. Of course, in Linux I don't ever see any reason to shut the machine down anyway. My laptop pretty much only gets rebooted when there's a kernel update to install. Other than that, it just gets suspended. So, kind of pointless in Linux, but easy. The same would apply to *BSD.

      • Re:My guess as to how it's done... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Bill, Shooter of Bul (629286) on Wednesday November 12, @06:25PM (#25740505) Journal

        Big question is, if you pull the cord, does it maintain state? Or will that require a "cold boot"?

        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:My guess as to how it's done... (Score:5, Informative)

        by bluefoxlucid (723572) on Wednesday November 12, @06:55PM (#25740843) Journal

        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)

  • Home test (Score:5, Funny)

    by konohitowa (220547) on Wednesday November 12, @06:23PM (#25740479)

    I pulled on a pair of boots and managed to beat their time by more than 3 seconds.

  • Cheating... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sofar (317980) on Wednesday November 12, @06:31PM (#25740575) Homepage

    This is still cheating - it's first of all not actually booting but suspending/resuming (albeit smartly).

    Most importantly the system is not actually shut down, so it still draws power to refresh the memory. This will likely suck on high-performance laptops where the large amounts of ram with high voltages will suck the battery dry in a substantially short time.

    And worse, this technology will take a _long_ time to shutdown. It's sacrificing a lot. We can (really) boot+shutdown a linux box in +- 10 seconds. Would you want a 3 second boot if your shutdown time becomes one minute?

    For people who are on the go a lot and tend to open/close their laptops a lot, this may actually reduce their effective work time a lot.

  • YouTube syndrome (Score:5, Funny)

    by istartedi (132515) on Wednesday November 12, @07:46PM (#25741351) Journal

    The video suffers from YouTube syndrome. Symptoms of this condition include one or more minutes of stuff we don't care about. The condition is most extreme when the event we care about is of short duration. Although it is not entirely curable, it can be treated by posting the time of the interesting event in the comments section. In this case, the event in question occurs at 2:38. Remember, this is a treatment not a cure. The treatment still consumes bandwidth and time. In the future, we may have a Flash plug-in where the annotation feature can be used to denote points of interest, with the ability to skip to a keyframe just before said point. Until then, only video posters can prevent YouTube syndrome. Remember, if the event of interest in your video is of short duration, the video should not be any more than twice as long as the actual event. Introduction, at most, should identify you and/or your company. Anything that can be explained more efficiently as text should be put in the little text section that appears in the upper right.

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