The Death of Booting Up 557
theodp writes "'Booting up was a bear,' recalls Slate's Farhad Manjoo, 'something to be avoided at all costs.' But now, he adds, 'It's time to rejoice, because all that's in the past. Computers these days can go from completely off to working within 30 seconds, and in some cases much faster. Apple's MacBook Air loads up in 16 seconds, and machines based on Google's cloud-based Chrome OS boast boot times of under 10 seconds. Even Windows computers are fast — with the right set-up, your Windows 7 laptop can load just as quickly as a MacBook.' Perhaps at home, but how's that working out for you at work? Have reports of the death of long boot times been greatly exaggerated?"
What about phones? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:it's true you boys (Score:3, Informative)
Have you seen what his work PC actually loads? His experience matches mine with the shitload of crap many multinationals put on their desktops. 10 minutes in not far fetched, even with a good SATA drive. He doesn't mean that his machine is "not booted". He's most likely logged in and he can move his mouse, but actually "doing" anything is extremely slow because the machine itself is still loading so much due to the initial login.
Re:it's true you boys (Score:4, Informative)
The SSD costs more than banning Facebook, which will recover an unproductive 3 hours / day.
From my experience, people will have (and need?) downtime during the day whether you get rid of some distractions or not. They will just make other things the distractions in the amount they can get away with and you won't end up with any more throughput and will have decreased morale. Take it from someone that used to study workers behavior as a profession and give the efficiency studies to the employer, we usually throw out the first couple days of data. After a couple days of the inspector checking work times and such, workers go back to their normal routine and ignore the inspector.
That is why it is better to pay for performance and goals than it is for time (where the job allows). Let them manage their own time, just get the job done when it's supposed to be done. (Again not all jobs obviously can be setup this way)
Re:it's true you boys (Score:4, Informative)
One of the biggest things I remember noticing with the Vista RC years back was how much less time I spent waiting for random apps to start during the booting process. A big problem with XP and earlier OSes was that MS didn't have any code to start applications sequentially, which would result in them all rushing to get data off the disk at the same time.
Even now, the time it takes me to boot my much faster desktop with a much faster disk is a few minutes longer than what it takes me to boot my laptop. The main difference being that I've got XP on my desktop and 7 on my laptop.