Windows 8 Will Introduce Super Speedy 8-Second Boot Times
Jealous of your Macintosh friends who own one of Apple’s recent MacBook Airs which boot up in the blink of an eye? Well, good news, my Windows brethren: Windows 8 will introduce super speedy boot times that will see your PC running in just 8 seconds.
In a new blog post on Microsoft’s recently launched Building Windows 8 blog, Gabe Aul, a director of program management in Windows, details the “fast startup mode which is a hybrid of traditional cold boot and resuming from hibernate.”
First, Aul explains Microsoft’s mission:
Our challenge then, was to design a way to meet all of these desires on today’s PCs without requiring some special new hardware. These were our goals:
- Effectively zero watt power draw when off
- A fresh session after boot
- Very fast times between pressing the power button and being able to use the PC.
In order to achieve these goals and dramatically reduce Windows boot times, Microsoft has developed a process which simply hibernates the kernel session rather than shutting it down completely:
Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk.
Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested).
Those improvements make for Windows 8 boot times that take just 8 seconds in Microsoft’s teaser video (above), which are a huge improvement over those seen from Windows 7. Endless boot times were always a huge niggle for me when I was a Windows user, and this improvement alone would be a huge reason to upgrade for me.
What do you think of faster Windows 8 boot times?
[via TechRadar]
Leave A Comment
