In age of impatience, cutting computer start time

[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.