Discussion on:

Poll: Realistically, how fast should a PC boot?

Could someone take a moment to explain why it is so important that your PC boot in as short a time as possible. I don't consider a one minute boot time to be a problem, but there are many that do, please tell us why?

nt

a clean install of DOS 6 - hit switch to boot of OS - 25 seconds. Another twenty seconds to boot into Win 3.11

To boot my current P4 2.4 ghz to log on screen in SimplyMEPIS Linux 8 - is 40 seconds - OS and GUI, which is NOT really part of the OS, but seen as part of it now days.

So I voted 30 to 60 seconds.

Now, can anyone explain why most of the new versions of Windows take so much longer than the old ones, considering the machines are thousands of times faster in turning on and processing the code?

I don't really care how fast the computer boots, as long as it runs well, who cares if it boots up under 30 sec.

Back in the bad old days, before we manage to train users in the great concept of defraging a drive and developers in auto storage management within the OS - it was common for a system that had had a lot of use with applications being added, updated, and removed to take ten to thirty minutes to boot from turn on to I can now log in.

One place I was at the drives were five years old without having been defragged, when I started there. One Friday afternoon while the rest of the office were off at a technical conference of their type (mechanical and electrical engineers) I went around and defragged every computer - took three hours per system, but I set them all going at once.

Monday when they arrived and they booted while they were still taking their coats off, scared the hell out of most of them. It was quite funny watching their reactions.

Take them away for a day to add program updates to tools they need, defrag and watch the amazement the next morning.
Still can't convince my IT people to get a real defrag utility scheduled in their tasks.

So I borrow the ol' defraggler, bad me, and run that.

Run XP on a P3 with only 256 meg of RAM.

Slo-o-o-o-w. At least 10 minutes to boot to logon and another 10 to log on.

Like the infamous "boot accelerators" and a bloated anti-virus prog and whammo! 30 minute wait.

Go to lunch.

And maybe don't bother coming back, if the AV got that update.

I have an old Dell Latitude CS, PIII 500 with 256MB. Boots up in less than 2 minutes to logon, about 2 more to load all background apps.

This is my netbook for lack of a better description, but it is pretty near bullet proof with the magnesium shell; and has survived off roading trips and a couple of accidental drop tests.

Boot, go get a coffee, go out for a smoke, come back and it's ready. I have a lot of programs that run when I boot up and don't feel like doing without any of them. The boot takes what it takes.

I've got dozens of computers on the factory floor. Employees clock in and out on them, and record the time they spend on each production work order. Boot time comes out of the work order. Five minutes to boot can be longer than some of our operations. Try explaining to a supervisor why his department's efficiency is down because of boot times. Be prepared to be handed your head.

I was giving my opinion as a retired man that... doesn't care how long it takes to boot.

I don't care much about how long my home system takes to boot. It's going to take several minutes to get the cat off the keyboard anyway.

...

Always takes longer than you would expect.

As fast as a MAC!

I am sure you know the answer already, but here goes.
Boot up time on my Windows 7 PC takes 37 seconds, why? Because I have the latest and greatest hardware that supports all the added features that Win7 tries to employ; ie: 8gig ram, 1TBHD, Quad core AMD etc. and it is snappy no matter what.

Now, I am almost certain that "ALL" of those darn computer hardware/software companies all get together at some point and say; you know what, if MS comes out with that new OS this year, we will work with them to make sure that any PC over 2 years old won't be nearly as snappy as it should be just so that consumer has to say to themselves; man I have to upgrade my PC so it can be snappy and dandy with the new OS Microsoft has.


Hence, they either buy a new PC from Dell, Gateway, Acer etc. and/or they buy new hardware components from Best Buy and whatnot. See, that cycle of buying and upgrading is, and I swear to the CPU god, a darn conspiracy between the computer companies to keep that all powerful buy/sell cycle going. Hehe, anyhow my thoughts on that.

working on a brand new Toshiba with Win 7 Home Premium, initially it took over three minutes to boot to log in screen, then another minute after you log in. After I cleaned the Toshiba added crap out, I cut the initial boot down to two minutes. then I went in and shut off all the Windows set default crap the user doesn't need or use, set to auto log in - as client wanted, and got the final time down to two minutes from switch on to ready to use - included the auto log in.

My three to four year old 2nd hand Dell with SimplyMepis Linux 8 is much faster than that.

But, considering the modern systems use a CPU that's around the 2 to 3 ghz as against 25 mhz of twenty years ago, and the cpu design is said to be thousands of times faster and more capable than a 386 - well the modern cpus should be an order magnitude faster in the 5,000 plus range - the motherboards are said to be hundreds of times faster too. So modern systems should be booting in a fraction of the time of the old 386 systems, yet they don't - hmm. Enough said, I think

Computers are like trucks in certain ways. As they get bigger and more powerful, we pile on more loads for them to carry. Revo uninstaller tells me that I have 159 installed applications on my harddrive. A certain number of these are more than 100 MB each. My old 66 Mhz computer with 540 Mhz harddrive would have choked to death L-O-N-G before it had any such load piled on it. (Forget the one before that with an 8086 processor and no harddrive at all.) The power and capacity of modern computers is really just keeping up with demand and this is why they are not hundreds and thousands of times faster. Would not Microsoft Edlin scream in comparison to Word 2010 if it were installed and configured to run on hardware capable of running Word 2010?

process. The boot to logged in should, at most be, the

Operating System
Graphics User Interface
Firewall
Anti-virus

and nothing else.

MS should just have some seperate process for loading the critical files needed then the Firewall and Antivirus and nothing else. Then load the other stuff with a delay, ie; the added on application startup stuff.

I'm not talking about using a 3rd party app either, just having a default way to boot the critical files plus firewall/antivirus would be nice in Win7.

You need to remember that a goodly portion of the boot process occurs BEFORE Windoz, or any other OS, starts to load.
& that may be where most of the problem lies.
I haven't personally researched it, but Maximum PC mag had an article that stated the BIOS was the main culprit for slow boot times.
I'm not sure I buy it, because as 1 post put it, there does seem to be some level of conspiracy to keep as steep as possible of an upgrade path going.
That really doesn't excuse Windoz (or others) of not designing a post and load sequence that would assign & execute boot priorities in a safe & reasonable order.
I guess its more profitable to ignore the way to speed boot times than to actually try to resolve such issues.

what with checking for USB and different graphics sources and a lot more memory to check than it used to have. BUT, the system now works much faster and flies through them faster.

With many of the systems, you can set the BIOS to show what it's doing and time how long it takes from push button to when it has that little message it's starting to load Windows. Now, I've not timed that as such, but it seems that same as it used to. When I tried this with a 386 / 25 mhz and a P4 / 2.4 ghz, by pushing both buttons at once, the P4 got to the Windows loading stage faster than the 386, despite having a lot more to load in the BIOS. Yet, the 386 had Windows open and ready to rock and roll first, by a very noticeable margin.

The thing to do is to look at the huge list of 'services' that Windows has loading with the modern versions, most of which didn't exist or open in the older versions.

Hell, one way to shave time off the opening time is to disable the Windows services that it requires to enable their techs to hit your system from the outside - that makes a big difference, just there. Here's a list from another post I made recently - and it's not comprehensive:

'off the shelf' OEM Win 7 Home Premium set up - straight Microsoft defaults

1. Control Panel - Administrative Tool - Computer Management - Services

(all the following settings had a default of Automatic start - I think they should be either manual or disabled - unless your corporate set up requires you to use them)

Bluetooth Support service
Remote Desktop Configuration
Remote Desktop Services
Remote Registry
Routing and Remote Access
Windows Remote Management

2. Control Panel - Windows Firewall - Advanced Settings -

(these firewall settings are default set to allow - all now changed to block by me)

Inbound Rules

Remote Assistance - seven of them
Remote Event Log Management - six of them
Remote Volume Management - six of them
Windows Remote Firewall Management - four of them
Windows Remote Management - four of them


Outbound Rules

Remote Assistance - seven of them

..............

I'd also add to the list the wireless zero config, unless you use it.

My computer is not ready to go to work at that point. Boot time should be from the moment you push the start button until the computer is ready to go to work. Is anti-spyware included in your anti-virus requirement? SUPERAntiSpyware is the next to last item to load and go to work on my main computer when I boot. That would be at about the 2 1/2 minute point with HP printer software the only thing left to load.

A few posts back I read that you "...So modern systems should be booting in a fraction of the time of the old 386 systems, yet they don't - hmm. Enough said, I think..."

I have run into several cases so far where after installing Win7 it booted in roughly 30 seconds, but after one or two other re-boots, it took about 2 minutes. I am baffled as to why it is happening on some machines that it is taking that long to boot.

Oddly enough, the 8 PC's we just got are Dell Optiplex's and are all the same configurations, yet some will boot in 30 while others in 2 minutes. Something is clearly boofed in the bootup department with Win7.

I hardly ever order one at a time. I noticed that 4 machines ordered identically, same build, one order will have different user buggaboos, in addition to different boot times......I'm installing OptiPlex 360's with max RAM (4GB)- 6 ordered with the same build, one order. Of the 2 that are in service, already notice differences. Has to be the user's profiles.

I have 3, soon 4 years old hardware in my box and it boots win7 ultimate in ~30sec

Ernest - To be fair about boot times of yesteryear you'd have to load the older OS on today's hardware or today's software on the hardware of yesteryear.

Boot DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 on a current 6 core i7 or PhenomII X6 (assuming you can install them) and compare the boot to usable time. My VM loads in a couple of seconds. Windows 95, 98, and ME VMs take about 10-15 seconds. I use Virtual Box for whatever it is worth, faster and light than VPC.

I haven't tried loading these natively as the hardware is fast enough to cause memory faults and loops in that old code.

Ernest, if you had to remove a bunch of Toshiba stuff off that computer, that means there's probably a lot of "crap" left in the registry. HP loads their share of crap too so the first thing I did when I got this computer was to uninstall all the stuff I didn't want on it.

I use to use a commercial registry cleaner (paid money for it) and my computer still booted slow and was sluggish. Somone told me about Eusing so I decided to give it a try.

Words of caution: ALWAYS backup the registry first. ALWAYS create a restore point before touching the registry. Make sure you have a boot disk or recovery disk in case you delete something you shouldn't. If you are not familiar with the registry, have a tech do it for you.

I ran Eusing and held my breath. It found over 1700 items that were left over from the previous OS (XP). This was right after running the software I'd paid for. My boot time was about 30 seconds compared to almost four minutes and my system ran like new again. I've used Eusing ever since and never had a problem with it.

I run Windows 7 Home Premium now and I use OS customization software. My boot is a little over 30 seconds. Your new system shouldn't take as long as it does to boot. Hope this helps a little.

all the registry crap. The problem is that Windows is designed to drown the registry in all the crap, unlike the *nix systems.

The Toshiba wasn't mine, one I was cleaning up for someone else, and I did clean a LOT of crap out of the registry too. They have it back, now, and are surprised at how fast it goes, NOW. And also pissed - they thought to save $50.00 that the local e-waste people charge for taking away old electronic gear, so they asked me if I wanted the computer, I did.

1 three year old P4 2.4 ghz system took four and a half minutes to boot into XP Home Premium. I cleaned up the registry, took out all the crap, and got it down to two minutes. Then bumped the RAM from 256 MB to 1256 MB and a 256 MB AGP graphic card instead of setting aside 64MB system RAM for the graphics - the bloody thing flies now, about 65 seconds to boot, and when I swap the drive to boot into Linux, it's booted in 35 seconds. The previous owner is now super pissed that they listened to a neighbour and bought a new A$3,000 system when a few hundred dollars of parts would have fixed it all up.

Me, I'm happy with a new tower system that flies, and that's gonna be for my games and other stuff.

Am running an Asus G2S, with a pitiful HDD write-speed rating, and still can't replicate your so-called experience. Try trolling in the FOSS section!

I am in the process of installing new, super-duper machines - replacing ones from 2004 & 2005 that run fine but don't have enough RAM & never will get enough RAM to make em as fast as my users think they otta be - or processor speed, etc. How else can Intel & Dell stay in business, I ask.

It takes me nearly 5 minutes to get a usable desktop in Vista, but it's all the addon junk.

The Vista search engines hammer the machine at bootup.

Adobe hammers the machine at startup. Have to check for updates!

My Virus scanner hammers the machine at startup. Have to download new definitions!

Java hammers the machine at startup. Have to check for updates!

If all of that stuff is disabled, the OS boots up very quickly.

This is why people always say mac's and Linux boots up faster - sure, they don't have as much addons available

== John ==

have much more efficient ones that work on a more efficient OS.

I have Adobe Web Premium CS4. Even having that I use Foxit .pdf Reader because it's irritating when Adobe Reader wants to check for updates when I want to simply read a document.

Dont add search, remove virus scanner, disable java startup and stop using stupid addons

If anything add delayed startups for programs you dont need instantly

My 1MHz Apple][ on floppies booted faster and was ready for work than my current multi-core 3GHz machine.

The reason? For every % in performance increase, we get another 2X% of OS code to be run.

....

I just had to say, my Gaud, I can't believe it!

Some 20-something was shocked when I said something about U-tube a couple of years ago while I was shopping with my college age grandson. When I said, "oh I go back to the 286" he looked at me as though I had just dropped in from Andromeda. My 386 was a DX-40, on which I ran DR-DOS--and of course at that time had an occasional person look at me smugly and tell me there was no such thing.

What I really wish is that Microsoft would do something about the painfully slow load of its office products on my Mac Pro.

and easier to use.

I install it on all of our computers. We have Office 2007 and 2003 but everyone knows if they send me a document it needs to be readable by OO.o or they're going to get it right back. Office 2007's proprietary formats are crap, an effort to keep people away from OO.o, you ask me. My users know to change the default.

Do everyone a favor, including yourself, your correspondents, and others by installing OpenOffice 3.2. It will read and write .docx and .xlss files. No need to return any .docx files and make yourself look silly.

I can even withstand a touch of snark.

I appreciate the heads-up and will get the latest OO.o at the earliest opportunity, meaning when our bandwidth cap isn't near the max. Thank you. Made my day!

I just looked, we're working off OO.o 2.3 right now.

It would've used up a quarter of our bandwidth cap during regular hours. Satellite Internet leaves a lot to be desired but it's our only 'broadband' option.

docx (and doc) never were good document exchange formats, which is why there is always RTF and HTML.

So if we can't be bothered to save a document in a format requested (it's just so difficult), then we are seriouly riding the high tide of Lame.

We only have the student version of Office 2007 on one PC which will expire soon. So that we can all open .docx and .xlss files, if we ever get them, we need OO.o 3.2 on the other 6 computers on this network.

Thanks, Microsoft, for changing the formats. The reason was why, again?