New Phoenix BIOS Starts Windows 7 Boot In 1 Second 437
suraj.sun excerpts from a tantalizing Engadget post: "Phoenix is showing off a few interesting things at IDF, but the real standout is their new Instant Boot BIOS [video here], a highly optimized UEFI implementation that can start loading an OS in just under a second. Combined with Windows 7's optimized startup procedure, that means you're looking at incredibly short boot times — we saw a retrofitted Dell Adamo hit the Windows desktop in 20 seconds, while a Lenovo T400s with a fast SSD got there in under 10."
BIOS (Score:5, Interesting)
That is indeed really fast boot to desktop. I like it how it shows the Windows loading screen almost immediatly too.
This also brings a new friend for F5 hitting. To get to the bios menu you'll be smashing F12 as fast as you can during boot.
But the article is a little low on details of optimizations. As I've understood, BIOS isn't really that complicated nor does it do any heavy calculations. It basically just brings hardware up and tests it, which takes most of the time (not that the 5-6 seconds is so long wait anyway). So have they optimized something else, or are they just skipping those tests?
Re:BIOS (Score:4, Funny)
I wonder when they will get around to to doing this on servers. I have some that are pushing 5 minutes before the OS even loads.
Re:BIOS (Score:5, Informative)
Also, I suspect, more of the server delays have to do with real needs(notably staggered spin-up of drive arrays) or coordination issues between vendors(your server manufacturer can't do much about how much time a 3rd party RAID controller's option ROM decides to waste once it takes over, and even integrated controllers are usually just 3rd party stuff with some degree of rebadge).
You'll probably actually see fast boot sooner in the cheap seats, which are much more likely to just be a basic business box relabeled as a "pedestal server" or reboxed as a cheap 1/2U and will thus be able to borrow the fast boot stuff directly from the consumer lines. That is also where servers are much less likely to be backed by any serious redundancy, which would make coming up quickly more of a selling point.
Re:BIOS (Score:5, Interesting)
But yeah, you can't spin up that many drives at once. I've heard a server where the drives were making up and down "pitch" changes during boot up... Not good
Re:BIOS (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah. I'd tend to agree with GP. If you're a critical service, you want on-line redundancy, so you roll over immediately and it doesn't matter how long the second server takes to reboot. If you're not critical and you don't have redundant servers, 5 minutes of down-time probably isn't much worse than 1... you just have to schedule it at an off-peak time.
Re:BIOS (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, how often it boots and fast it boots are often small considerations - depending on where you sit.
Consider a file server that crashes and reboots twice a year and takes 5 minutes to come back up... thats 99.998% availability and from an infrastructure perspective thats pretty dang awesome.
From a helpdesk point of view, they'll suffer one heck of a beeting everytime it goes down and that'll be all they remember of the server.
Same goes for the users, all they'll remember is the 5 minutes it went down when half the company was doing something important.
Consider active directory though (or any kind of multi-master replicated service) - again, your talking about a server thats really not doing anything terribly difficult, but unlike the file server if it goes down no ones likely to notice. On top of that your often more concerned that the server will come up working then how quickly.
As for noise, well the good ol e450 from sun fully stacked with 20 15k disks (not to mention its in-built fans) used to make very amusing noises as it came up and some of the time it went down was because the disks managed to disconnect from the backplane (and you could hear the difference if you were around it during a boot often enough) - a good hard whack and it was sorted. Wondefull little machines those
Re:BIOS (Score:5, Insightful)
You're not going to get that kind of uptime from a Windows box even without problems, thanks to patch tuesdays. Of course, it depends on how downtime is defined. If you use Microsoft's definition, "scheduled maintenance windows" are not classified as down time, but the rest of the world defines such things as down time. This is how they skewed the numbers to get such high uptime statistics for their "get the FUD" campaign.
without redefining down time like Microsoft does, you will never achieve that kind of uptime on Windows unless a) the box NEVER get infected b) you NEVER install the Windows updates and c) you NEVER change the configuration or change/update any software.
Re:BIOS (Score:5, Insightful)
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You're not going to get that kind of uptime from a Windows box even without problems, thanks to patch tuesdays.
You don't _have_ to patch, you know, only if you are (or think you will be) impacted by the problems fixed.
Of course, it depends on how downtime is defined. If you use Microsoft's definition, "scheduled maintenance windows" are not classified as down time, but the rest of the world defines such things as down time.
No, it doesn't. Most SLAs allow for scheduled maintenance and do not consider t
Beeting (Score:5, Funny)
Arg! Support says the server's down again. Let's throw beets at them!
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From a helpdesk point of view, they'll suffer one heck of a beeting everytime it goes down...
Arg! Support says the server's down again. Let's throw beets at them!
Crap! They've retreated to higher ground, I can't throw a beet all the way up there! ...Maybe if I crouch for a few seconds until I start flashing, then I'll be able to jump up there! ...Aw, hell... I didn't hit them with the beet! I guess I'll just have to wait here until they throw something at me that I can grab and throw back at them.
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1) anything considdered a Tier 2 or business critical app should be a cluster, load balanced system, or simply be highly available with no single point of failure (switching, cabling, power and all for Tier 1 systems). Further, a cluster is never less than 3 of a kind, so when 1 is reboothing, high availability is maintained, so reboot time should be irrelevent.
2) Reboots for patches should be done during maintenance windows, scheduled, and thus should never interfere with user operations. If it needs to
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What are you doing that takes that long to shutdown? Is this just that you're doing work in 10-minute blocks and not stopping until the end of a block? Staggered app shutdown? Syncing a ton of uncached writes? Using 1980s hardware?
Re:BIOS (Score:4, Insightful)
5? WIth a nice raidcard, full memory check and some other POST tests I've seen them easily go over 10 minutes. Some were definately close to 15 minutes from my experiences.
The question here is, what will you trade for this? Faster boot probably means something will be skipped.
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Unless you design it to do multiple tasks in parallel, instead of sequentially. Then it doesn't matter how many checks you add as long as adding them doesn't significantly slow down the others.
Re:BIOS (Score:4, Insightful)
With HDDs, especially the very fast ones, spin-up current is substantially higher than operating current. If you have a bunch of them in the same place, you either have to massively overspec the 12volt rail, or just stagger the spin-ups and do them in batches. Each drive can only spin up so fast, and you can only be sure they are all working after they have all spun up.
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That's because you don't want a server to just gloss over and ignore the fact your RAID array is fucked and data is being sent to oblivion and that sort of thing.
It doesn't take a long time just for the sake of taking a long time, it takes a long time to make sure everything is correct as it should be.
How often do you reboot your servers anyway? It shouldn't be more than a few times a year at most.
Re:BIOS (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you actually read the patches that come along on patch Tuesday or do you just mindlessly install them?
If you did the former, you'd see you don't actually need to install them and reboot every Tuesday, you could simply queue them up until there's a critical patch. Some you don't even need to install at all, if there's a critical flaw in IIS but you haven't got the IIS service enabled and never intend to, it's not worth rebooting the server over.
You're making the mistake a lot of bad admins make- assuming you need to install the latest and greatest the second it's there. You don't, you only need to install patches to fix issues you're having or to fix security flaws that actually effect you. Yes this means you actually need to understand security and be able to judge whether a particular security flaw is exploitable in your situation or not.
Regardless, what it comes down to is this, if you're having to reboot your servers more than a few times a year then you're not running a network as well as an IT professional really should do.
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Thank goodness they actually scan the hardware instead of just dumping the OS into memory.
Besides, how often are you rebooting these servers of yours?
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Weirdo!
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Re:BIOS (Score:5, Informative)
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1 second isn't the boot to desktop time, it's the time needed for the BIOS before transferring control to the OS. How long the OS takes to get to the desktop is a separate concern.
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Your current machine takes 20-30 seconds merely to do the BIOS startup?
The guy you were replying to was referring to a desktop boot, with the kernel loaded into the BIOS. You didn't specifically say, but I assumed.
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New BIOSs are UEFI.
As much as they don't like to say it, UEFI is basically an operating system. UEFI supports byte code applications (that's right). It has a driver framework and drivers for many of your devices, a TCP/IP stack, etc...
I think that's a good question about how you enter setup. If you can through keypresses, that time is too short to include keyboard initialization I would think. Since this is a laptop, they would be using their own keyboard firmware and they cheat. So it probably wouldn'
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The problem with BIOS is that right now you don't even _need_ it in Linux and Windows. Linux/Windows have their own device drivers, so BIOS is not necessary.
If I made this notebook, then I'll first check that 'Control' key is pressed (using hardcoded codepaths) and if it's depressed then jump directly into the bootloader, skipping device initialization (apart from hard drive and memory controllers, of course, but they usually are pretty fast).
If 'Control' key is pressed, then I'd just do a normal BIOS start
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Also, it should be possible to embed Linux kernel image directly into EFI working memory (which is structured as a partition on a hard drive) and jump directly into it as early as possible and then do hard drive initialization in parallel with other devices.
Though we won't save that much time with new SSD drives.
Re:BIOS (Score:5, Interesting)
If properly parallelized and you remove all the pointless Waits, a BIOS check should be damn-near close to immediate and still manage to check everything.
BIOS writers probably figured, eh, so what if it takes 10 seconds or so, thats still pretty quick, and never rewrote their crappy legacy code.
Re:BIOS (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really, the magic is in the wording. "Start loading the OS within 1 second" means it's just bypassing a whole lot of the network checks. The average BIOS starts loading the OS within about 1.5 seconds, so this isn't exactly a huge difference.
This isn't even a windows thing or a linux thing, as it's strictly about how fast the bios passes to loading the OS from the hard drive.
yeah, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
After you see the desktop it's another minute for all the system tray crap to load. And if you're stuck with corporate antivirus? May as well throw some cinderblocks in the trunk of that nice sportscar and watch it do 0 to 60 like an arthritic Ford Pinto.
Re:yeah, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
... but if you're building a computer that requires a fast startup time - like an in-car PC - 10 second startup time is a godsend.
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Vista and Win7 are much better about responsiveness during that initial phase right after log-in, where background applications start. I won't deny that the system still slows down, but it's nothing near so bad as XP where if you didn't wait until the system was DONE with loading, it would actually take *even longer* before you could do anything useful.
Multi-core helps too, but a lot of it is differences in the OS. Both the kernel's scheduler and the background process initialization were improved (although
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Your confusing hardware and code. it's more to do with the ssd then windows code.
Re:yeah, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Marketing:
Windows now boots (the bios) in under a second giving you a faster user experience (but a usable desktop in roughly 10 minutes)
Linux boots (to a usable desktop) in 25 seconds.
Reading without the bits in brackets, which do you think is best? That's what marketing is all about.
I have an idea (Score:4, Funny)
If they could get rid of the vacuum tubes, Windows could turn on instantly.
Very important (Score:2, Funny)
Re:moderation goof (Score:2)
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Actually, it has a lot to do with it.
I use Linux and I hate rebooting. Not because it takes a long time to boot -- it doesn't -- it takes maybe 30 seconds. It is because it is an interruption. When someone has to reboot frequently such as Windows users, reducing the time it takes to boot becomes increasingly important.
So when Microsoft hears "I hate rebooting all the time" they don't focus as much on the OS and the way it hosts applications, they focus on how fast the system can reboot. I will be the fi
Re:moderation goof (Score:4, Interesting)
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I reboot XP about once a month. I guess it helps me that I am not a complete idiot (obviously, by using Windows at all, I must be some level of idiot), but I don't think there are all that many people rebooting Windows multiple times per day.
I often do stupid things like ignoring automatic updates for several weeks at a time (if none of them are fixes for remote exploits of software that I use, where's the hurry?).
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Really, what is there to do? Kill everything with extreme prejudice and flush the cache. Unless you've got gigabytes of pending writes it really shouldn't take as long as it does.
Though, the power switch achieves (almost) the same effect with no waiting at all.
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Though, the power switch achieves (almost) the same effect with no waiting at all.
Yeah thats a good idea. And why are you still sitting on your chair and watching the turning off screen while its going down? It will turn off itself, you know.
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Unless you're waiting for a laptop to turn off closing the docked hardware profile so you can remove it from the dock cleanly and when it boots up next it'll be in another location with a different dock and network address or undocked and using a wifi connection.
Not all computers are desktops, and faster boot/shutdown times save batteries for real computing.
Why is parent moderated funny? (Score:2)
That's not funny at all but the sad truth.
Try installing any Windows system and you'll be happy about any second you safe during the many reboots!
1. Windows install - reboot ... that sums up pretty quickly. And if you try to install something older, like XP, the reboots for Windows update alone will costs you an endless amount of time.
2. Some driver install - usually at least 1 reboot
3. Windows update - rarely with 1 reboot only
4. Some major application install - often another reboot
It will also "start to boot" Linux in 1 Second! (Score:4, Interesting)
Great BIOS!
But there is no special relationship between this bios and Windows 7, meaning that Linux can't also start-to-boot in 1 second!
The Upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 is going to start up in 10 seconds, meaning that from you hit the power button until you have the system ready are only 11 seconds on this system.
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Boots OS, logs in user, loads desktop environment (including all its background processes) and is ready to use in 10 seconds? Highly doubtful (theoretically possible, but I won't believe it until I see it).
Loading kernel / drivers, running init (including loading the libraries that it and its child processes need), starting the X server, and even reaching a login screen in 10 seconds would be impressive.
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It takes my Debian system about 16 seconds to get to a login (well, it would if I weren't also starting up a web server and database server).
But why on earth would you start the X server before you get a login prompt?
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The Upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 is going to start up in 10 seconds, meaning that from you hit the power button until you have the system ready are only 11 seconds on this system.
I guess it's time for me to try Ubantu. I tried various dostros years ago and settled on Mandriva, but the boot time is about the only drawback to it that affects me.
And to those who say "you don't have to reboot Linux all the time like Windows", I have to pay for my electricity. The PC is shut off when it's not in use. Waste not, want no
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Fedora also has been working on fast boot times as well.
Unfortunately, openSUSE (which has been my favorite distro) doesn't seem to have the same number of active developers it once had. And they haven't been working towards integrating the advancements that Ubuntu/Fedora have developed to speed up boot times.
Ubuntu 9.10 + SSD = 5 seconds boot (Score:5, Informative)
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But there is no special relationship between this bios and Windows 7, meaning that Linux can't also start-to-boot in 1 second!
The Upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 is going to start up in 10 seconds, meaning that from you hit the power button until you have the system ready are only 11 seconds on this system.
Indeed, 20 seconds to boot is not "incredibly short" by any means, unless you've been trapped in Windows for so long that your standards have lowered. Fedora has been at the 20 second mark [fedoraproject.org] for a while now. On "retrofitted" platforms (similar to what is used in the article), Linux has achieved five second boot times [lwn.net].
It's worth noting that in the Linux world, "Done booting means CPU and disk idle" as per Arjan van de Ven, whereas in the Windows world your computer is still loading up services and anti-virus
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The twenty second link you posted described a plan to GET to 20 second boot. When I read it, I see a lot of bugs and test results from people saying it's a goal they are trying to get to, and I don't see conclusively that "in all cases fedora always gets there in 20 seconds."
I think that most real-world linux users take longer. Your statement is misleading.
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Actually there is a relationship. It's called a "marketing deal". Phoenix and Microsoft promote their work in combination, expecting "bigger than the sum of its parts" effect out of it.
Apparently it worked, seeing how some people here think it's really great that an OS boots in freakin' 10 seconds. When Coreboot with Linux does it literally in 3.
Re:It will also "start to boot" Linux in 1 Second! (Score:4, Funny)
Hey, now, nobody asked for a car analogy just yet!
wait, wait... change the headline (Score:2)
wait, wait.... from what I read and from what I know about Slashdot...shouldn't the headline read "New Phoenix BIOS Starts LINUX boot in 1 second"?
Or how about "New Phoenix BIOS Starts OpenBSD Boot in 1 second"? or even "New Phoenix BIOS Starts OS X Boot in 1 second"?
I don't understand the obsession... (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of us keep our machines running all the time. I would think a quicker return from suspend or hibernate would be more useful.
Re:I don't understand the obsession... (Score:5, Insightful)
The two reasons for ever-on PCs is either when the user doesn't like to wait the (in my case) minutes for the boot sequence to run through: whether that's Linux or Microsoft, it's far too long. /. base, so there's no need to identify yourselves - I get it), if it gets a few million more PCs turned off then it's a good thing.
The second reason is when they're running stuff in that background: a server or data collection, or just a long download,. Obviously in this case, faster booting won't help but ignoring these power-users (which is probably a big proportion of the
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The two reasons for ever-on PCs is either when the user doesn't like to wait the (in my case) minutes for the boot sequence to run through: whether that's Linux or Microsoft, it's far too long. (...)
Getting the the boot sequence to go down to a few seconds is a great step forwards, but after that I still need the following applications open: Mail, Browser, Media Player (and possibly a couple more, depending whether it's the work computer, home desktop, or home laptop). Plus having those apps' sessions just right.
A good sleep implementation allows you to easily pick up where you left off, which is still a serious advantage.
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Waking up after a hibernate or sleep is down to the operating system - but the BIOS still has to boot, so this improvement will help your wake-up time just as much as your boot time.
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The obsession with the boot time benchmark has always struck me as rather strange considering it's something I only do once every month or two.
On the other hand, I guess 'PC's generally go through BIOS check when coming back from a full hibernate, so this would help their response time there. But I've never really noticed significant battery drain on my Mac in normal 'sleep' mode, which then wakes up instantly.
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A good sleep / hibernate implementation that doesn't use much (or any) power would be indistinguishable from hyperfast booting.
You do know that the hibernate (suspend to disk) function does not require any power (once the computer enters in hibernation state).
What we need is very fast hibernation algorithms implemented in fast non-volatile memory such as Flash or MRAM.
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From a power grid standpoint, you're correct. From a user standpoint, I'm starting to think that speeding up the startup/shutdown times on computers is the better way to go.
As a laptop user who commutes, I've found that both sleep and hibernate have their issues. Sleep is very fast to go into and come out of, but switching batteries means rebooting anyway. hibernation lets me switch batteries, but I've got 4 gigs of RAM. even with 2x7200RPM hard drives in a RAID-0, going into and out of hibernation takes ab
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Most of us keep our machines running all the time.
Yes, we do, and that is wasteful. With faster boot and support for wake-on-lan in routers, we could be making significant energy savings.
I would think a quicker return from suspend or hibernate would be more useful.
Returning from hibernate performs a full hardware boot (including BIOS POST) -- hibernate merely restores the user-space memory from disk.
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Yes, we do, and that is wasteful. With faster boot and support for wake-on-lan in routers, we could be making significant energy savings.
Boot times have exactly zero to do with why I leave my PCs on all the time and, I suspect, the same is true for the vast majority of people who also do so.
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Sure. That's fine for a desktop or a laptop that you hardly ever travel with. However, if you need to reboot a server boot time matters and if you travel a lot (even just on a corporate or college campus) boot time matters.
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I don't get what the big deal is either. How about just making systems more stable, so you don't HAVE to reboot? Hell, other than the occasional bluescreen because the unsanctioned nVidia driver is acting up, or mandatory reboot after a driver update, I don't think I've rebooted my laptop since I got it (going on 5 months now). It was the same with my previous system - as soon as I got working drivers installed for everything, crashes disappeared and the thing would run for months on end... all on XP, mind
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laptops. even for suspend, bios can eat up a good few seconds. and if the os boots in 10 seconds, well... that's faster than the suspend on my laptop.
If you only have like 30 minutes to use a laptop (say during commute), you don't want to waste a minute (or 2-4 minutes) starting up your machine.
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That said, our Windows XP machines almost never crash--probably over a year between an unexpected reboot (most are from software installs.) If you want to keep your XP (Mac, Linu
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This BIOS will give a quicker return from hibernate.
Hibernation, of course, involving powering down the machine. The rest is just loading enough of the OS to read the hibernation file back into memory and restore the appropriate state registers.
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1) Laptops.
2) Buggy suspend-to-disk implementations.
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Have you ever noticed there's a bright yellow spot in the sky? You should check it out sometime..
Didn't anyone ever tell you that looking directly at sun is bad for your eyes? Are you trying to kill us or something?
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"I keep my [computer] asleep most of the time, so that I have a completely usable machine in two seconds."
And you don't see the potential benefit of a quick boot time?
So they just took out the POST? (Score:2)
The reason PCs take so long to get to the part where it boots an OS is because it, by default, does a POST. POST is Power On Self Test. It is a diagnostic procedure to make sure the machine is working correctly before continuing on into the OS. This can save a lot of troubleshooting Suppose a second hard drive or some other system device that is not critical to booting the OS? You might think the problem is software/driver related. If the problem is memory failure of some type that doesn't manifest it
Combine it with Moblin (Score:5, Interesting)
Intel's Moblin boots incredibly fast. Their early prototypes got to desktop in 5 seconds. Here's a video of Moblin 2.0, possibly taking a bit longer than that but it's also probably a nicer desktop ;-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqmuPFZ1RWo [youtube.com]
Moblin's aim, AFAIK, is to get you to a full *usable* desktop as quickly as possible. So unlike what Windows (unless they've improved this since XP, when I last checked!) and some Linux distros do you don't get your quickly loaded desktop bogged down by loads of services starting in the background. You get there, you're done (although you may still have to wait for the network to connect but whatever you do won't be wallowing whilst other stuff loads).
Hilarious video (Score:5, Insightful)
"Don't take my word for it, take Microsoft's word" !!!
I think I'm going to trust a random schmuck any day rather than Microsoft.
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I think I'm going to trust a random schmuck any day rather than Microsoft.
What if the random schmuck is Bernie Madhoff, Sony, or Rod Blagoyavich? I'd trust Microsoft before I trusted a convicted felon, a company that rooted my PC, or a corrupt politician.
Equivalent Exchange (Score:2)
This is good news! Your bios will allow you to recover in small 1-minute increments those 20 hours you just spent upgrading to windows 7.
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/09/12/windows-7-upgrade-could-take-20-hours-reasons-to-do-a-clean-in/ [downloadsquad.com]
Why the obsession with instaboots? (Score:2)
Seriously. Hit the power switch and go occupy yourself for a minute or so. Drink some coffee. Read some Baudelaire. Have some private time on the john making twosies. Whatever.
I know that it's a nice goal to aim for, but having Windows up and running in 2.3 seconds just isn't a reason to get all frothy and rabid for me. YMMV.
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Seriously. Hit the power switch and go occupy yourself for a minute or so. Drink some coffee. Read some Baudelaire. Have some private time on the john making twosies. Whatever
You are right that boot times on user workstations don't matter so much.
However boot times on servers are much more important. Say you have a power cut, your UPS fails and you have 10 racks of stuff to get up and running PDQ. You really will care about the 3 minutes extra per server you spend watching it POST check ram and scan for SCSI disks before it even gets to the filesystem checks.
Those extra minutes could be spent fixing the things that came up in the wrong order and testing the critical services are
so they bypass the basic ram and other checks that (Score:2, Informative)
so they bypass the basic ram and other checks that should be checked and also makes it hard to get into bios as the window goes by to quick.
Fast (Score:4, Funny)
Boot Windows in 1 second. That's got to be a record time in how frustrated people are with Windows that they want to put the boot into it THAT fast!
More importantly (Score:2)
How quickly does it shut down?
Joking aside, I do usually find that OSX and in some cases Windows and even Linux can take longer to shut down than to start up. It makes logical sense as a startup environment is pretty much constant whilst shutdown always has different loose ends to tie. But until recently, it's always been the opposite.
Highly Optimized UEFI (Score:3, Insightful)
Means Apple paid Intel to mangle it so it will not boot OS X. Is it any wonder that no EFI motherboards are on the market?
Fast BIOS done before. (Score:3, Informative)
This is hardly some major breakthrough.
Asus came up with a nice hack on their EeePC dubbed "Boot Booster". It dumps the system state right after POST on a HDD partition, and on subsequent boots it reads that straight into memory, so you have 1-second "POSTs" going straight to the bootloader.
And then you have coreboot [coreboot.org], which is as fast as the machine it runs on: without taking any shortcuts, it can do all the grunt work in 3 seconds or so.
Maybe the breakthrough is Windows booting fast, but that's a different story.
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How often do you boot your phone? (Score:2)
Really, this obsession with boot times is maddening. Having sane and reliable support for sleep/hibernate is much more important. Why? Because just booting up your system gets you only half the way. You will have to launch your apps, open files to work on and so on. If you can just suspend and wake a system you can start working were you left off.
I have only started to understand this after I got my Macbook. Close the lid, sleep. Open it, start working where I left it two seconds later.
Nothing new (Score:2)
My computer boots in less than 2 seconds (Score:3, Insightful)
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Anecdotal evidence: Lenovo T500, Vista x86, 3GB usable RAM, 120GB SSD - boot time until usable in under 30 seconds, reboot is actually faster than resume from hibernate.
Lenovo Thinkpad BIOSes have been booting in about a second and a half for years, when network boot was disabled and HDD was the first in boot order.
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I've never understood those claims, or perhaps you've just managed to get a computer that has no background processes running. My Dell Precision M70 is about 4-5 minutes from cold boot to usable, and Bios is maybe 10 seconds of that, at most. Resume from hibernation (with 2GB of RAM and a 5400RPM IDE drive) is between 25 and 30 seconds.
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How to get Fast Boot Times (OS Independent, but I've never done this with MacOSX)
Step One: If you bought a ready made computer with Windows and you want Windows, format and reinstall Windows clean with the Windows CD that came with it and defragment it, or install your choice of OS. Vendors install crap that will slow everything down, and you should just start clean. Remember to keep a backup of working drivers (if needed)!
Step Two: Disable all unneeded services. In Windows you do this from the Control P
Re: (Score:2)
The OS is a Lenovo Vista OEM installation, stock, with no deep modification other than being transferred from the HDD it was shipped on to the SSD via Acronis. SSD is an OCZ Vertext 120GB, stock retail. This system is not sacrificially tuned for speed and includes Acrobat Reader, Virus scanner and all that stuff.
Since I don't have that much experience with Vista yet, I guess an expert could speed it up some more.
Re: (Score:2)
This is nothing to do with the OS, this is about reducing the time before the OS starts to load. There's not much the BIOS can do from then on.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They're only demonstrating the time it takes in BIOS (almost nothing), not in OS.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
No, it hasn't, and if it had, it would have nothing to do with OS X, and waking a computer from suspend has nothing to do with the BIOS POST time. Why do you Mac fags insist on advertising your computers -- fraudulently! -- every time something vaguely related comes up?