In age of impatience, cutting computer start time

[Noreen]

It is the black hole of the digital age — the three minutes it can take for your computer to boot up, when there is nothing to do but wait, and wait, and wait some more before you can log on and begin multitasking at hyper-speed.

Some people stare at their screen and fidget. Others pace or grab a cup of coffee. "Half the time, I go brush my teeth," said Monica Loos, 40, who is starting a business selling stationery online from her home in San Francisco.

Now the computer industry says it wants to give back some of those precious seconds. In coming months, the world's major PC makers plan to introduce a new generation of quick-start computers, spotting a marketing opportunity in society's short attention span........................

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/26/technology/26boot.php

[Simon]

"It's ridiculous to ask people to wait a couple of minutes," said Sergei Krupenin, executive director of marketing of DeviceVM, a company that makes a quick-boot program for PC makers. "People want instant-on."

Why?  What's the big deal in waiting a few minutes?  You have to wait for a kettle to boil, a toaster to toast, an egg to fry.  Nothing is instant, and I can't see why people get so uptight about it. 

[Rik]

I think this fixation with instant is bad for us. A couple of minutes is not significant, and society should stop creating pressure to use every last second.

[Glenn]

I used to have to wait 30 minutes or more when loading a game from tape on my Spectrum 128, so what is 3 minutes.

[Simon]

I think this fixation with instant is bad for us. A couple of minutes is not significant, and society should stop creating pressure to use every last second.

Unless, of course, you only have a minute to live. 

[Rik]

I used to have to wait 30 minutes or more when loading a game from tape on my Spectrum 128, so what is 3 minutes.

10%. Do I pass?

[Rik]

Unless, of course, you only have a minute to live. 

In which case, you were unlikely to get to the web page you wanted.

[Simon]

 

[Noreen]

I've never timed my Vista laptop but I'm sure that it's faster than three minutes.

[Rik]

Out with the stop watch then, Noreen.

[Sebby]

I agree with Rik that wanting everything to be instant isn't necessarily a good thing. But I think we're all guilty of wanting things to be quicker. I'm actually pretty happy with the time my computer takes to start up, but if instant-on was the norm, I wouldn't complain about it.

[Rik]

Get hold of a BBC Micro, Seb. Sorted.

[Sebby]

That was the first computer I ever used. It was great.

[Rik]

It was - so far seeing too, all that expansion possibility.

[JB]

I used to have to wait 30 minutes or more when loading a game from tape on my Spectrum 128, so what is 3 minutes.

And find that the load failed in the last 5 seconds.

[john]

My BBC micro was great too, flick a switch on the back and it booted almost instantly. I think with a move to solid state drives we might get back to this.

I leave my laptop in hibernate mode so it doesn't take as long to boot up anyway.

[Glenn]

Best to reboot it every now and then John, I have found a simple reboot fixes now end of problems that Three's mast field engineers have. It goes something like this

ME 'Do you switch off the laptop'
Eng 'No'
Me 'When was the last time you did'
Eng 'When I spoke to you last time'
Me 'OK reboot it now'
waits 5 mins
Eng 'It's all ok now thanks'
Me 'Reboot it each wee........' phone goes dead

[john]

 

I do do a full reboot every couple of weeks or so.

[Rik]

I must admit I find the same, it seems to forget itself every so often.

[cavillas]

I can do quite a lot in a few minutes, ask my wife.

[Rik]

Put food in front of me and I can eat a lot in a few minutes!

[Simon]

Put food in front of me and I can eat a lot in a few minutes!

 

[Rik]

Oh yes I can. (Anyone mention the panto season is coming?  )

[cavillas]

My "new" Vista Celeon machine boots from cold to availability in 45 secs.  I have a number of start up apps plus the sidebar as well.  I still like it and also Office 2007, quirky but very useable.

[cavillas]

Oh! No you can't

[john]

He's behind you !!!

[Rik]

Well slap my thigh.

[john]

Well slap my thigh.

No thanks Rik, slap your own thigh 

[Rik]

 

You don't know what you're missing, John.

[john]

You don't know what you're missing, John.

I think I'd prefer to remain in blissful ignorance Rik 

[Odos]

Personally I want the machine to start up as fast as possible. The reason why,,,, I have it set up with multiple OS partitions, each partition set up for different OS's and diifferent tasks. Depending upon what I'm working on I may need to switch partitions a number of times in an hour. All that extra time waiting for bootup mounts up.

[Lance]

It sounds like you would benefit from using VMs!

[Dopamine]

I hate waiting for my PC to boot, and I'm old(ish)! It's far worse for my children. They'll come in: "Dad, I need to use the computer to send an urgent email / check my bank balance / check the bus times, etc, etc".
"Sorry, but I'm busy working. Turn the other one on."

Then all I hear for the next five minutes is huffing and puffing while the machine boots, then runs slowly while Windows checks in the background for updates, or the anti-virus does the same, so I suggest to them that it might be sensible to leave the spare machine turned on during the day:
"That's a waste of energy, not very green" is the reply. (Oh, please, spare me any more of the green eco-warrior stuff!)

Any manufacturer that can produce a machine that's completely usable within 45 seconds is on to a winner, and I'll be an early customer!

[Odos]

It sounds like you would benefit from using VMs!

I must confess ignorance of VMs. Years ago I did experiment for a few hours then gave up as the performance hit was more than I was prepared to pay. After reading your response Lance it got me thinking again so I've done some checking today and from what I've been reading nothing has changed.

From my searches it appears that all VM implimentations suffer a performance drop ranging from around 5% up to 90%. I can have either a small performance drop and hardly any usability ( for me ) OR usability and a big performance hit. 

Think I'll stick with no performance hit and tweak for faster boot times 

[Lance]

That's interesting because most things i've read recently when it comes to VMs is that the performance is good, as is the usability.

[Odos]

That's interesting because most things i've read recently when it comes to VMs is that the performance is good, as is the usability.

As I stated before I'm basically ignorant of VM's. I may well have been reading the wrong reviews / info I realise that all reviews etc reflect the preferences of those writing them with regards to usability, speed etc so there's never an authorative source. The reason why I said what I did was that on all comparison tables I looked at, they always tended to show that for an increase in full compatability ( i.e as if running in a real partition with full OS command and hardware access) there was a decrease in speed.

The other factor which everyone seemed to agree on was that there was at minimum a 3% reduction of speed and any disk intensive task magnified this reduction by a large margin, and I tend to do just that, for instance I dabble at video encoding which tends to hammer the HDs.

If you think this is no longer the case then I may well have to experiment with it again when I get time 

[Lance]

I've not read in depth, but I know that a lot of companies are using it now to consolidate the number of servers.