Why Do Computers Take So Long to Boot Up?

An anonymous reader writes "Computers take too long to boot up, and it doesn't make sense to me. Mine takes around 30 seconds; it is double or triple that for some of my friends' computers that I have used. Why can't a computer turn on and off in an instant just like a TV? 99% of boots, my computer is doing the exact same thing. Then I get to Windows XP with maybe 50 to 75 megs of stuff in memory. My computer should be smart enough to just load that junk into memory and go with it. You could put this data right at the very start of the hard drive. Whenever you do something with the computer that actually changes what happens during boot, it could go through the real booting process and save the results. Doing this would also give you instant restarts. You just hit your restart button, the computer reloads the memory image, and you can be working again. Or am I wrong? Why haven't companies made it a priority to have 'instant on' desktops and laptops?"

hum

hibernation?

Re:hum

If your only concerned about fast startups, why don't you just install Windows ME.

Or linux with 'init=/bin/sh'. Only takes a couple of seconds on my machine.

Re:hum

Or linux with 'init=/bin/sh'. Only takes a couple of seconds on my machine.

And runs completely off your sense of self-satisfaction! ;-)

Re:hum

That can happen when you have more than 1GB of RAM. That happened when I upgraded to 2GB of RAM in my system. I did a quick Google search, and found that there is actually a Microsoft released hotfix [codinghorror.com] for the problem.

Re:hum

Not saying you're wrong or anything, but I've rarely had problems with it. You need to have at least as much free HDD space as you have RAM so it can write the image, but beyond that it's been pretty stable, at least for me, and I run tons of apps.

There is one issue I had at one point which is that my nVidia video drivers would BSOD on resuming, but updating them fixed that and I'm pretty sure they've fixed it completely in their newer cards.

Re:hum

Hibernation is still not "instant-on" by a long shot. My P4 laptop still takes almost 3/4 as much time to resume from hibernation as it does to boot.

Re:hum

Hibernation is still not "instant-on" by a long shot. My P4 laptop still takes almost 3/4 as much time to resume from hibernation as it does to boot.

Mine takes about the same amount of time to boot to the welcome screen as it does to come back from hibernation, but after hibernation i log in instantly, while it takes me about 45 seconds to fully load my desktop (dual-core 2.8ghz 2GB ram, windows xp sp2)

Re:hum

...or you can just go into Quicktime's config and disable the startup option. You don't get that same feeling of beating The Man, though.

Re:hum

this is still unacceptable. it's a media player. there is absolutely no reason that it should be starting up at startup. same goes for adobe reader. that has an option to startup at startup. why? more and more programs say "it runs faster" if you do it that way... but you know what? the more programs that do it, the longer it takes the computer to start up. ugh.

Re:hum

Quicktime is a trojan. It hijacks your browser's media settings WITHOUT asking, even if you tell it not to associate with any of those files on startup. It starts up it's own little preloader app which is NOT necessary, and overrides you when you try to disable it.

Finally, those fucks have the audacity to insist YOU PAY TWENTY BUCKS just to get something every other general media player offers for free: full-screen video. And even if you refuse to pay, you get a nag screen every time you load the program.

Mind you, I own a Mac, and even though I can use an applescript hack to bypass the nagware, I still avoid using Quicktime as a rule when I can. If you must have your Quicktime files, VLC plays most of them without installing the trojan.

Re:hum

Get a faster hard drive (if you are willing to pay the premium).

I saw a WinXP laptop with a a 10k RPM drive resume from hybernation in what looked like 5 seconds.

Re:10K RPM LAPTOP DRIVE? LOLZ...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16822116156 [newegg.com]

Or maybe you are.

--S (not that you'll find SAS in laptops, but hey, this is slashdot.)

Re:hum

Hibernation is still not "instant-on" by a long shot. My P4 laptop still takes almost 3/4 as much time to resume from hibernation as it does to boot.

You've got to be kidding, on my machine, I press the button on the TV thing and presto, I'm right where I was before I turned it off. And it just takes a couple seconds.
And it never crashes either. Those computer things are like magic.

Re:hum

Hibernation doesn't save any time when it comes back up to rebooting, it's more of a convenience when you need to shut down and don't feel like closing all your apps. You might get the 10 seconds off your reboot when it comes back up, but you're probably looking at several minutes of extra paging time once you get back to using your apps. I once made the mistake of hibernating my machine when it had Photoshop, Matlab, Visual studio, and 5-6 firefox windows open. I spent an additional 5 minutes just trying to close all those apps so I could restart the machine to get my performance back.

The only time I hibernate now is when my carpool is leaving and I need to shut down my laptop quick and don't have time to shut down everything. Standby isn't bad, but any savings that hibernate gives you are short lived.

comfort vs security

>The other issue I have is that I normally use a VPN to connect to work, and the VPN tunnel doesn't like getting shut down and restarted, especially with a different IP address, so I still have to re-authenticate by typing in my security token code to the VPN client.

Isn't that what's supposed to happen? You've left your computer for a while, especially a portable one, it better disconnect any secure resources it has. It's comfort over security as usual, but I think this is by design.

Re:hum

Depends on what mainboard you have.. Love my new Asus mainbord with that so called "ams live" feature. Takes about 3-4 seconds for the POST on a coldboot.

And if you really want to speed up the bootprocess on some system have a look at the linuxbios project, if you mainboard is supported that is.

And some hints on how to speed up the bios "boot":
- Hard-configure the HD's you have in your system and deactivate any unused master/slave positions.
- If running PATA make shure master/slave is connected to the correct position on the cable and use the jumper to set it to master or slave instead of autodetect.
- Activate fast-boot
- Disable anything you dont use on the mainboard, if running linux check if you can disable IDE controllers you dont use for booting, some might still be usable after booting the OS.
- Activate fast-boot, on a warm-boot there are alot of tests that can be skipped.
- If you have any bootable cards in the system disable their boot-bios so they dont have to be scanned during the POST.

Just a few hints.

Re:hum

even with several open programs.

The point of hibernation is that it doesn't matter how many programs are running. It'll always write the same size file when hibernating, so it'll always read the same size of file coming back up. The number of applications running is largely inconsequential.

Of course, it should be noted that there IS a way to have Windows leave the hibernation file alone unless you tell it to hibernate again; that is, a hibernate once, resume many kind of situation. It's a trick often used when building a car PC. You get the system to the point where you'd want the system to start from, then tell it to hibernate. From then on, it'll resume from that spot. If you can get your system to work properly with hibernation, it's just about as fast as you'll ever get it to boot.

Because coffee takes that long to brew

Boot time is generally all PnP detection etc.

Linux on an embedded system configured for fast booting(without plug and play peripherals etc) can boot in 2 seconds or so.

Re:They have instant coffee now.

Because people are stupid. If there were a specially-accessible (say, via the F8 key at startup on Windows) "re-detect hardware" boot option, and the default just went with whatever the OS already knew about, then people would first bitch about how "I put in a new soundcard, and Windows can't even see it!" And then when they learned how to detect it, they'd bitch about "Why can't Windows just do that automatically?!"

Seriously, you want an OS that does exactly what you want at boot time? Use Unix. You want something that works reasonably without you having to mess with it? Use Windows. Don't blame Microsoft for your own poor choices.

Re:hum

I dont think that hibernation answers the question that the poster was asking. Hibernation is a great way to resume a session. But how about resuming from a "just booted, nothing loaded" scenario? For some reason, and maybe it is because Microsoft is revising the definition of "booting", people seem to equate resuming from hibernation or sleep or deep sleep modes booting. It is not. It is resuming from... It is amazing though, that MS now is bragging about how fast Vista "boots" when all it is really doing is resuming from some sort of sleep, suspend or hibernation mode. The poster brings up a good point. Actual booting could be sped up by having a booted image saved - similar to a hibernation file, that the machine uses to boot from instead of actually going through the boot process of loading everything.

Not just memory and registers

And there's always the issue about changing it when you make changes to your system: update the OS, Virus Scanner, etc.

That's not a particularly difficult thing to handle. A boot loader such as grub or ntloader can have its configuration file updated to force a full boot of the OS, which would include as its last step the creation of the new memory/register image file.

The biggest problem of booting up like this is that the contents of memory and cpu registers isn't enough. The hardware has to be properly initialized as well. Since the internal state of the drivers indicates that has already been done, a consistent mechanism to force re-initialization of all hardware has to be in place after the system reloads the image. That might take as long as a normal boot does.

You haven't asked before

It is because until now, you haven't submitted your question to Slashdot.

Re:TVs don't need to do very much

Also, the hardware on a TV doesn't change. It just doesn't. So you don't really need any of the BIOS' going "Wtf? Who am I? Do I have arms and legs? no. Do I have a cd drive? yes. What time is it? Will there be cake?" If you go entirely to an instant on through complete saving of the boot configuration, you lose all of the plug and play goodness that everyone oohs and aahs about (that is, suddenly things won't Just Work (TM) anymore). If you swap out a hard drive, or add a new DVD+RW drive, your BIOS doesn't freak out because it asks at every bootup what its got. The OS doesn't freak out because it has hardware detection routines too. Anything that can change from one bootup to the next which makes any difference at all to the things that start running during boot must be detected. Try putting your computer into hibernate (suspend to disk), and then changing the amount of ram. Will it come back up out of hibernate nicely? I doubt it.

Come on. Look square at the issue.

The problem is old-school linear thinking we've inherited.

There is no technical reason that a computer could not wake up, verify the keyboard, memory, hd, mouse and display are the same (in a few microseconds, probably) and be up and responding very well to the user, while (new concept, brace yourselves) the computer carefully brings up other hardware subsystems and makes them available as they become functional. You could be in a word processor, graphics editor, all manner of things that don't require more hardware until you do something like print or attempt to access the network; if those subsystems are not ready when you try to use them, the design would allow for [establishing hardware, wait or cancel] and there you have it.

There is no problem whatsoever with plug and play concepts coexisting with fast usability other than current design shortcomings end users have been forced to live with. The computer is running as soon as the HD is spinning, memory sized, and the video card is on and the KB and mouse work. Just because current operating systems don't let you begin working at that time isn't a reflection on plug and play as a concept, it's a reflection of linear thinking that descends from old single tasking systems like early DOS.

The idea that a 2...3 GHz 32 or 64 bit CPU cannot bring itself to decent usability in under a second is one that is silly right on the face of it except in that common systems are using old school thinking and layering more and more crap on top of that thinking. There is not a thing in the world that says drivers can't be loaded on demand, or after usability from boot, or separately. Nothing.

Re:Hibernate

same with my ibook g4, i just put the lid down and walk away. it always wakes up. on the powerbook hd, and macbooks (incl pro), sleep actually stores a hibernate image on the disk so that if you either 1) run out of battery or 2) manually pull the battery out (lets say on a long intl flight) and put in a new one. If you do a wake when you haven't killed of the power source (99% of the time really), it uses the RAM to continue operation. If you've disconnected power for whatever reason, it will wake up, present a little loading bar (incl a screenshot of your desktop if you don't require a password to unlock your computer from sleep/screensaver). Heres an Apple doc on it: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302 477 [apple.com]

Re:Hibernate

That's one of the things that always amazed me about OS X. You can fault it for various reasons, but by god, you shut the lid on your iBook, and five seconds later, it's in zzz mode (with a battery life of about two weeks - I tested that once). Open the lid up, go "one, one thousand..." and it's awake and ready to use. I've tried this on some of the newer Intel-based MBPs and regular MBs, and it works just as well. So Apple has it dialed. What gives with the rest of the computing world? My stupid Latitude has such a buttfargled ACPI that windows goes "Derr, BSOD" when I try to use hibernate, and of all the Linux distros I tried on it, only Kubuntu came close to doing it right. The problems it encountered at wake-up were sufficient that I finally gave up on hibernate (as well as Kubuntu - on to a better KDE distro), and simply have it blank the screen when I flip the lid shut. It's good for about four hours that way, which is usually enough.

Re:Hibernate

My understanding is that thiis partially due to ACPI and BIOS being generally "sucky" and long due for replacement. PowerPCs used Open Firmware, and Intel Macs use EFI -- both of which are far superior to BIOS.

Vista's lack of EFI support is a real sign of MS's misplaced priorities, imho.

Re:Errr....

I find XP refuses to hibernate with more than about 600MB of active memory; it makes an attempt, then returns you to the desktop with a popup bubble saying "Insufficient resources exist to complete the API". This necessitates me closing all my apps before each hibernation, and after a week or two even that won't work.

Anyway, I remember using something closer to what the story is talking about, on the Amiga of all places; FastBoot [aminet.net] had you boot normally, then save a snapshot of the system at the end of the startup-sequence. Future boots would use this snapshot, which you generally didn't want to update at each shutdown -- you got 2-3s boot times, but each boot was clean. It worked surprisingly well for a scary hack :)

Re:Errr....

The CRT filament-maintenance bias trick was done for awhile in the 60s and 70s, but it was eventually recognized for the waste of energy that it is. What happens nowadays is simply that the rest of the signals are not applied to the CRT until the cathode has warmed up. This improves the tube's service life, and avoids the "expanding dot" effect that you'd see on older TVs that brought all the tube voltages up at once.

Re:Errr....

CRT TV's turn fast because the tube has a bias circuit to keep it warm. When turned "OFF" most TV's burn about 5W to keep the tube warm for fast start.

No, they do not "keep the tube warm". Yes a TV might draw a few watts when in "off" mode due to the power supply for the digital logic section always being on. But just about every CRT based TV or monitor I have seen, except for maybe some real high end broadcast equipment, takes a few seconds for the tube to come up.

You definitely weren't around in the 60's and mid 70's when we watched the tube warm up and the displayed image grow from a small dot to the full size of the screen. Sometimes it would take 20 or more seconds before the picture stabilized. When you turned the TV off you got to watch the "boot" process in reverse as the display shrunk to a dot. It was a big deal when we got "instant-on" TV's.

Well yes, TVs used to take longer to fully power up, and didn't have dampening circuits to prevent CRT display after being turned off. They where basic fully analog devices, there was no logic that prevented the display of an image when the CRT was not yet in an operational state. In the 60's they would have been vacuum tube based (as in the whole TV, obviously a CRT is a vacuum tube) and taken a long time to fully warm up, and needed adjustment and retubing on a regular basis. In the 70's they would have been transistor based, and would have come up much faster, how ever they would still be fully analog and subject to the same power up and power down effects.

Modern TV's have digital control sections that can compensate on the fly for variations in the analog sections of a CRT display, and higher performance switching power supplies and fly-back circuits that come up to operating voltage much faster. But you still have at least a short wait for the CRT to come up, they are not kept on warm idle of any kind. At least not in any displays I have worked on.

I know this is probably getting off topic, but your post was marked +5 informative yet has miss information in it. Having worked on many CRT displays I just wanted to point out that the CRT is definitly not kept on any kind of warm stand-by, none that I have ever seen any way. What you are describing sounds similar to the stand-by mode in most guitar tube amps, where the heater filaments in the tubes are kept on to keep the tubes warm but the rest of the amp is powered down. I am not aware of this being done in modern CRT displays. Seems to me that if you did this it would dramaticaly shorten the CRT's life span, if the heater filaments were on 24x7x365. Someone correct me if I am wrong...

boot time

I think a large portion of the delay is initializing and setting states for all the hardware. Reducing the kernel and libraries to an image might speed things up, but not by much. It'd be about as fast as starting up from hibernation mode.

If you want a quick start, just use sleep mode. Takes very little power and you're up in seconds.

Re:boot time

>I think a large portion of the delay is initializing and setting states for all
>the hardware. Reducing the kernel and libraries to an image might speed things
>up, but not by much

I completely disagree. It takes very little time to initialize hardware and a whole lot of time to load software. For instance, when I just installed xp64 after my last upgrade, the system would be up and running in about 20 seconds. Now that I've been running the machine for 6 or 7 months and have been through a few cycles of installing, removing, and upgrading various pieces of software (with notable differences made upon the installation of adobe and microsoft productivity apps), it takes closer to 40-50 seconds to boot. And that's with absolutely no change in the hardware configuration.

fast booting TVs ?

"Why can't a computer turn on and off in an instant just like a TV?"

My new HDTV takes about a minute to boot. Something about an ATI bios

Re:fast booting TVs ?

My brother got a fancy new tv recently and I was bothered by the boot time. It is only like 15 or 20 seconds, but I really didn't understand why the tv was able to show me a message explaining that it was busy turning on, but unable to show video. That kind of thing always leads me to wonder, is there some real technical limitation, is there some spaz that thinks it's fine(booting for 15 seconds is better than being a little blurry for 0.5 seconds or something equally stupid), or is the development process just broken?

True story: I worked on an application a couple of years back for a client who was going to distribute it to his clients. It was a Java program, so expecting long start-up times we had the designer put a splash window together for while it was starting. But, through one optimisation or another, I managed to get the start time down to about 2 seconds.

When we showed it to the client, his response was basically "there's not enough time to see the splash window; put a delay in there."

So the app shipped with a 5 second delay in the startup process so that his clients had enough time to see his fancy graphics.

Maybe it's just Windows XP?

I triple boot NetBSD, FreeBSD and x86 Solaris on my old desktop with an Athlon XP processor, and 512 MB of RAM. I don't recall off-hand the exact processor speed.

Regardless, NetBSD is the fasted of the three. It takes a little over 6 seconds from power-on to the login screen. FreeBSD takes 11 seconds. Solaris is a bit longer, clocking in a 14 seconds. I know these times because I was curious of this question as well, and so I did the timings. All three systems are basically the default installs, plus whatever initialization file changes there have been from installing various pieces of software.

Solaris does start into X, so that may be why it takes longer. Still, adding the 2 or so seconds it starts to get X running, NetBSD and FreeBSD are still less than Solaris.

Hardware and Security

There are two reasons why your suggestion won't work.

First, let's say that you upgrade some hardware. There will be no way for the OS to know that there's new hardware unless it goes through the hardware detection and configuration stages of bootup, which is what takes most of the time. Worse, if it doesn't do this, the system will probably just crash, as the memory image loaded will have the wrong set of drivers installed and they'll be pointing at the wrong set of hardware addresses.

Second, and this is more of a recent issue, there is a lot of work that's going into randomizing memory addresses to increase security. In the event of a security hole, randomized memory addresses make it far more difficult to take control of the machine as a hacker, virus, or worm can't use a hard-coded memory address during the attack. With a pre-built boot-up image, the memory addresses will not be randomized, which defeats a lot of the gain of this security benefit.

That said, you could just use hibernation on your computer. That is essentially the same thing as what you're asking for. A desktop is just as capable of sleeping or hibernating as a laptop is. The only thing is, if you want to make any hardware changes, you must remember to turn on the machine and do a complete shutdown first.

Also, there are companies who are focusing on bootup speed. In fact, every major Linux distro has been focusing on it for the last year or two. It's unfortunately just not that easy to speed things up without sacrificing stability or functionality.

STR

Suspend To Ram.

If you need to reboot, you're rebooting for a reason - likely because something in that "50 to 75 MB" has changed.

Of course, if your box doesn't support suspending to ram, then hibernation is an ok alternative. But sometimes hibernate can be just as slow, if not slower than rebooting.

end of line.

Re:Oh please.

don't you think that if computers booted in 1-2 seconds, people would be more likely to turn them off when not in use? odds are, if your computer takes more than a minute or so to boot you won't turn it off say over lunch or during breaks. think of all the energy we could save? for the energy conscious out there, you could start by turning monitors off when not in use.

Re:Oh please.

I really don't know if it's that great of an idea to turn of a computer over lunch. One of the hardest things on a computer (hard drive, motherboard, power supply, you name it) is starting up. That's when most hardware failures occur. Shutting the computer down for an hour at a time and rebooting is going to shorten lifetimes of your hardware. I think when that hard drive fries it might well take more energy to construct a new hard drive and restore backups, etc, than you probably would have saved during those 30-60 minutes x however many days.

Windows does a lot of writes when booting

I've spent a lot of time using Windows in virtual machines. For VM platforms that provide on-demand block allocation for virtual disks you can see a typical Windows boot do wild things like write to 250MB worth of blocks that were previously unused (i.e. the virtual disk grows by 250MB). NB: I'm talking about an ordinary boot, not one following installation of anything. It gets harder to see as virtual disk occupancy increases but it's an eye opener.

Valid point

it could go through the real booting process and save the results. Doing this would also give you instant restarts.

Interestingly enough, on IBM mainframes 30 years ago, booting OS/VS1 under VM/370 took over five minutes. VM, however, had a SAVESYS command that allowed the state of a virtual machine to be saved and later loaded at any time. We were able to freeze OS/VS1 close to the end of the boot process and save it. The same can, of course, be done with VMware today. I see no technical reason why an operating system should not be able to do this semi automatically for native booting.

Some will say hibernation gives the same facility, but (at least with Windows) a clean boot needs to be done fairly often (when using a Windows development box, I reboot it daily).

A history of startup time

Indeed.

In the beginning, say from Edison's development of the electric lighting system, through the invention of the fractional-horsepower motor which enabled the development of home appliances such as vacuum cleaners and washing machines, most things started up in a fraction of a second.

Then came vacuum-tube-based electronics, which took a minute or two to warm up.

Then came the "solid state" revolution, and, once again, things started up instantly. WIth the exception of television sets, which had a vacuum-tube-based "picture tubes" in them. However, manufacturers soon developed circuits that kept a small amount of current flowing to keep the filament partially warm while the set was "off," producing "instant-on" televisions.

Early hobbyist computers were instant-on, too. Before diskette drives were common, the machine had everything it needed to boot stored in ROM and was up displaying some kind of welcome prompt within a fraction of a second. Even when the serpent entered Eden in the form of "operating systems," startup was quick. When you turned on an 48K Apple ][+ with a diskette drive and spiffy Apple DOS 3.3, there was a brief "whish" as the disk spun and loaded a few K of code into the processor, and there you were.

It seems to me to be lazy design that says that booting consists of more than loading code into RAM and establishing state for the internal hardware. I have no idea why OSes must churn away for big fractions of a minute _running_ code. Why can't it just load a snapshot of the desired final state of RAM?

What really gripes me is that lately Windows and Mac OS X have taken to presenting an empty _illusion_ of a faster startup. What seems to be happening is that all the minute-long processes still churn away, but the processes that present the UI run in parallel. The result is that the visible desktop gets into a displayable and interactive state quickly. But while the UI seems to be ready, nothign else is... particularly anything to do with the local network. If you actually try to do anything on that desktop, you still encounter minute-long delays.

Gotta mention the obligatory Steve Jobs story here

(I hope I have this story right...this is from memory)

The story goes that the engineer working on the boot sequence for the original Mac was working late one night when Steve Jobs wanders past and asks how long the thing takes - the engineer is pretty happy that he's gotten it down to around 30 seconds (or however long it was) and that's probably good enough. Jobs then comments that they'll probably sell at least a million of these things - and each one will probably be booted a couple of times a day - and the machines will last maybe five years - so if he can save just one second more from the bootup time - that's equivelent to 113 years from the lives of Mac owners. So if you can save just one more second - that's like saving someone's life.

Talk about pressure!

But it's a serious point. The amount of human lifetimes that are wasted waiting for PC's to reboot is pretty horrifying - and there's a lot more than a million of them. Someone should take this seriously.

Re:Gotta mention the obligatory Steve Jobs story h

Hate to imagine the amount of human lifetimes lost on slashdot...

Re:Gotta mention the obligatory Steve Jobs story h

Well, if everybody just stared at their screens and drooled while they booted, I guess you could say something was being wasted. Except for all the quality drooling time, of course.

How many could it save...

If everyone did a few situps, pushups, jumping jacks, whatever while waiting for a shutdown + restart to happen, I wonder what the overall health impact would be? 1 second could turn into 1 jumping jack, which would be 113 * 365 (days in a year) * 24 (hours in a day) * 60 (minutes in an hour) * 60 (seconds in a minute) jumping jacks. 31536000 jumping jacks. How many lives would be so much more prolonged by that amount of jumping jacks? What impact could that make on the high obesity rates in America (guilty as charged...)?

Perhaps those lifetimes aren't wasted by necessity but by negligence, laziness, and choice.

Re:Gotta mention the obligatory Steve Jobs story h

The amount of human lifetimes that are wasted waiting for PC's to reboot is pretty horrifying - and there's a lot more than a million of them.

I just spent 30 seconds reading your post.

YOU BASTARD!

Re:Gotta mention the obligatory Steve Jobs story h

The amount of human lifetimes that are wasted waiting for PC's to reboot is pretty horrifying - and there's a lot more than a million of them.

Only if everyone in the world sits around and waits for it to happen every single time, and does absolutely nothing else with that down time. It doesn't count if you spend that time even THINKING about another issue/problem. You have to sit there motionless, stare at the screen, and do absolutely nothing but age.

Personally, I can find plenty of things to do with my time when I know I can walk away.

The more significant issue, IMHO, is the responsiveness of programs. Forget boot-up times, when you don't even have to be there. How about the delay between clicking the Firefox icon, and waiting for it to start-up so you can do useful work? How about the delay between clicking on a link, and having that link load and render? How about the ammount of time the system is unresponsive as it does something (like render a webpage) in the background?

That, IMHO, is many times more important, and something I certainly have to deal with far more often than reboots. Personally, I have a 2GHz system, with 1GB of RAM, and I still strictly stick with GTK-1 programs, because it's so much faster and more responsive than GTK-2 (or QT) equivalents (as well as not uselessly wasting screen realestate). Ever program I use has a fully functional GTK-1 equivalent, so I'm not missing out on anything by sticking with it, it's just an occasional hassle to change the default configure option, or using a different program because the new version of whatever dropped GTK-1 support (like switching from GAIM to Ayttm). It's a rare issue, and well worth the improved performance anyhow.

30 Seconds?

Around 30 seconds?

I work for a large Fortune 500 company which does IT consulting. My work-issue laptop comes with a lot of baggage, including anti-virus, anti-spyware, automatic backup & disaster recovery, a special system update program, et cetera, et cetera.

How bad is it? It's like this: I can start my computer, and within about a minute, I get a standard XP pro login screen. After entering my username and password, I immediately get up and walk away, down a flight of stairs, out the door, and about a hundred yards to our campus cafeteria, where I'll buy a coffee. By the time I get back, my coffee is cool enough to drink, and my laptop is usually in a useable state.

How about instant OFF?

What gripes me more than slow startup is the idea that a computer can't be shut off quickly.

The last time we had a power failure at work, I tried to shut down my Windows machine, which was on a UPS. For some reason, the machine decided at that very exact instant... apparently _after_ I selected shutdown... that it would be a good idea to download and install a system update first! There did not appear to be any way to interrupt the process. Knowing that the batteries on the UPS weren't what they usta be, I quickly turned off the CRT to reduce the load, crossed my fingers, and hoped for the best.

It took the machine the better part of ten minutes to shut down. Fortunately the batteries held out. Heaven only knows what would have happened if power had been interrupted while it was in the middle of installing a system update.

Years ago the science writers used to tell us that we needn't be afraid of computers taking over the world because, after all, we could always shut off the power. Yeah, right.

Re:How about instant OFF?

Or not shut down at all. One day last week I told my work PC to shut down, turned off the monitor and went home. Next day I came in, and it was saying 'Adobe Acrobat Reader has crashed, press 'OK' to continue'.

Like I give a crap. When I tell a computer to shut down, I want it to _shut down_; I do not want to come back hours later and find it didn't do what I told it to.

This is particularly annoying in the morning when I've left my home PC running overnight doing video or 3D rendering, and it's swapped out vast megabytes of stuff to make room for a totally pointless disk cache (what's the point in swapping out programs to cache multi-gigabyte video files when I'm processing them from one end to another?), so when I tell it to shut down it first spends five minutes spinning up all the disks and swapping back in all the programs it swapped out... but if I head off to work while it's still shutting down I may come back in the evening to find it still sitting there telling me that some piece of crap little applet that I never even wanted to run crashed while shutting down.

That's even worse than the fact that it takes two or three minutes after logging back in in the evening before it stops thrashing the hard disk and I can actually do something useful. At least I can make coffee or something while it's booting up.

Re:How about instant OFF?

When I tell a computer to shut down, I want it to _shut down_; I do not want to come back hours later and find it didn't do what I told it to.

It's called "auto end task", and it's just a couple settings in the Windows registry. I've been using it successfully for a VERY long time now, and it works exactly as you'd want:

http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/199/ [winguides.com]

If the program doesn't end (30 seconds) after it gets the kill signal, it gets killed without requiring you to be there to hit the button.

Re:How about instant OFF?

Only because Word can't save that document somewhere safe with all the meta data to restore that state when you next start up and ask you then.

It's a symptom of deeper problems.

Be serious

If Windows didn't go through the complete boot process each time how would it come up with random reasons to crash?

Re:I'm surprised no one has mentioned it...

"I blame it on our slow ass hard drives."

Slow? My ordinary, everyday IDE drives can read over 60 megabytes per second. That could fill my PC's entire memory in about fifteen seconds.

I suspect the real problem may be that the operating system is still paging in small parts of DLLs and programs rather than loading them all in one go. Loading 4k pages one at a time made sense when the operating system was a couple of megabytes, but when you're loading a hundred megabytes of crap off the disk just to get to the desktop, you'd be much better to load the entire thing in one go; disk seek times have improved by a factor of two or three in the same time that disk read speeds have increased by maybe a factor of a hundred.

Does Windows still do that?

boot times have been 30-60sec for decades

Jef Raskin [raskincenter.org], creator of Macintosh and Canon Cat (the latter embodied his instant-on ideal), also complained about the time it takes a computer to start up.

Startup times have not changed in several decades. Here are some data points [advogato.org] I collected a while ago:

AST boasts [cs.vu.nl] that "on a 4.77 MHz 8088 [MINIX] booted in maybe 5 seconds".

Data point. AMD K6-2/500 (bogomips : 989.18), 256MB, Gentoo 2004.1, kernel 2.6.5-gentoo-r1 boots in 39 seconds[1] (/etc/runlevels/default/ = apache domainname local mysql named net.eth0 netmount squid sshd syslog-ng vixie-cron)

Data point. G4/dual 1.25GHz, 768MB, MacOS 10.2.6: 33 seconds[2]

Data point. G4/350, 576MB, MacOS 10.3.3: 32.5 seconds[2]

Data point. P4 Celeron 2.4GHz (bogomips : 4734.97), 512MB, Gentoo 2004.1, kernel 2.6.5: 27.5 seconds[1] (/etc/runlevels/default/ = domainname local mysql named net.eth0 netmount sshd syslog-ng vixie-cron).

Data point. NeXTstation Turbo 68040 33MHz: 55.5 seconds[3]

1. from confirming Grub screen to login
2. from Apple logo to login
3. from NEXTSTEP boot to login

Gah. No way to do footnote references in mod_virgule? entities don't work, <sup> doesn't work...

Windows Vista ReadyDrive

Windows Vista's ReadyDrive feature is supposedly going to improve boot times, assuming you have a hard drive that supports it. Since the ReadyDrive hard disks are not available yet, I don't know how well it works, but you can read some more about it here:

http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_05c.a sp [winsupersite.com]

Windows Vista natively supports a new generation of hybrid hard drives coming soon from Samsung and other companies via a feature named Windows ReadyDrive. I haven't been able to test this feature yet because these hard drives aren't yet available, but here's how it works: The hybrid hard drives combine a standard hard disk with large amounts (1 GB or more) of non-volatile flash memory. This memory acts a cache of sorts, providing a number of benefits. First, the system will boot up and resume from various sleep states much more quickly, allowing users to get back to work more quickly. Because the hard drive, with all its moving parts, spins up much less frequently, you'll experience better overall performance and better overall battery life. (For this latter reason, the first generation hybrid hard drives will likely target the notebook market and not the desktop PC market.) Hybrid hard drives should also be more reliable than their standard drive cousins, again, because the moving parts won't need to spin up so often.

Interestingly, previous generation operating systems won't be able to utilize these hybrid hard drives unless of course the drive makers include drivers in the box to enable that support. But Vista supports this technology out of the box, so there's nothing to add or configure. If you have such a drive, Windows ReadyDrive will just work. It's a win-win.

Why can't a computer turn on and off like a TV?

honestly, this is like the dumbest possible way to ask why we can't have faster boot times.

Ok, maybe not. The dumbest possible way is probably something like:

"why can't the compujigger turn on faster, like the whatchamavision?"

but still, it's pretty damn close.

Already been done

What you're describing is mostly solved by hibernate; save the entire state to disk, and when you start up again, some mini bootloader restores the state. Doesn't mean others haven't tried different stuff. WinXP took some steps to make a first boot go faster. Put files accessed on boot somewhere special for faster access, etc. Cut boot down to.

But the basic problem is one of disk throughput and memory usage. There's a hell of a lot of stuff used on boot. CPU usage is secondary to pulling things off of disk. Unlike other computer systems, your desktop isn't intended to run programs directly off of ROM. It's intended to run a variety of applications, and accept a variety of underlying hardware. Since neither nor the hardware is designed to run a specific application from ROM, you can't just start with an assumed operating system or program.

Also, to bring up a nit, your TV only starts up instantly because it's halfway started most of the time. Turn it off for a long time or unplug it and you'll see it take a while to "warm up". This uses quite a bit of power. If you felt like it, you could pay extra to build a motherboard etc that supports suspend for desktops, but it takes a lot of effort to get the software right, so its primarily done for laptops. It'd be a nice comprimise between booting/hibernating and "instant on" that you want.

I remember when. . .

Back when I was a kid, I ran a cute little TRS-80 Color Computer. It had an on/off button. You pressed it, and it was on and ready to go. You pressed it again, and it was off, nice and tidy. Yeah, it had only 32 kb, but hey. It was fast.

Today I have an HP Jornada 820 built in 1999. It runs Windows CE, and it turns on faster than anything. You hit the on/off button and you are either on or off just like that. --Best of all, it holds open all of your documents and programs exactly as you left them. I feel confident not saving stuff because it's so rock-steady reliable. The little critter is run on Flash memory; no hard drives.

My PC. . ? Well now. . , that beast is slow. Very slow.

I thought electrons moved at the speed of light, so what's the hold up? I refuse to blame the hard drives; those things are usually faster than Flash memory. So what's up? Bloat-ware? Too much hardware to configure? Poor programming? All of the above?

I don't know, but I suspect that if engineers had their act together and were not constrained by the ridiculous way of doing things which are currently in place, we'd have much better machines available.

-FL

Yeah, why does it take so long?

I mean, all those gears and counterweights can't be that slow, now can they? Wait...

i-RAM

I'm surprised no one's mentioned Gigabyte's i-RAM yet.

According to Anandtech, booting with the i-RAM into Windows XP takes 9.12 seconds. [anandtech.com]

"With a Western Digital Raptor, you can go from the boot menu to the Windows desktop in 14.06 seconds; with the i-RAM, it takes 9.12 seconds. It's not instantaneous, but it's definitely quicker and noticeable."

Another problemis the hardware

An increasing amount of hardware is using firmware. To save cents, many of these devices are being sold without flash to store this firmware, and are relying on the OS to load the firware into the device on every boot.
This means that the OS must upload the firmware on a restart, or full hibernation. While it is conceivable that a system could be implemented to do this, and leave the device in a conistant state, it sounds like a tedius, error prone setup, that is likely to cause no end of problems.
Of course, you could do away with the problem by making us all pay an extra quater-cent for a few k of flash, like a sensible hardware vendor.....

lack of innovation

I use a mac powerbook G4 laptop. After a quick scan of the wtmp.x files, my average time between reboots is about 7 or 8 days. Let me translate: I reboot my laptop once a week. Outside of reboots, it goes to sleep, and wakes up in 1-2 seconds. I almost never wait for my computer any more (since I got my new 2g -o- ram).

I think the real question here is not "why do reboots take so long?", but why do you need to reboot so often. The people who design your OS are working to minimize reboot time, but at some point you will have to do a fresh cold boot to set the system up from scratch.

The tools to save that state are not good on windows (see title).
Why does so much of normal proceedure in Microsoft require a reeboot? (see title).
Why are windows OS's so unstable? The answer to this is clear - see title above.

S3 Standby

- A 'normal' cold boot of my PC takes about a minute
- 'Hibernate' takes about 20 seconds
- S3 Standby takes about 6 seconds.

One catch is that by default most systems use 'S1' mode for standby, which keeps the machine semi-alive including the CPU fan, power supply fan, etc. You can often go into the BIOS, change the default standy mode to 'S3' -- this will shut down the entire machine (including fans, etc.) but keep proviging a minimal power charge to the RAM in your machine so it won't lose its contents.

Since all the content remains in RAM that way, your machine will behave the same as if you did a hibernate, except it doesn't have to spend the additional ~25 seconds writing everything to disk first when you shut down, and also doesn't have to spend that time to read it back into RAM on bootup... Resulting in the ~6 second bootup time.

(While it takes some power for the RAM to keep its information, it is negligible compared to a complete shut down, since any modern PC still provides some power to the motherboard after it is 'powered off'. Case in point: See the LED on the main board indicating the power status on a machine that's supposedly turned off)

It's been a long time since I truly shut down my PC.

Note: the one catch is that if you do lose power to your machine while it is in standby mode, any contents that were in memory at the time will be forgotten again, and it will do a 'full' bootup next time you start. Hibernate doesn't have that problem, but takes significantly longer to shut down and boot up.

Why indeed?

Why can't a computer turn on and off in an instant just like a TV?

Well, first off, the comparison between a TV and a Computer is misleading. TVs for the most part, remain nothing more that big Audio Video amplifiers. If I could post a block diagram, you'd have the receiving section (UHF/VHF etc), the audio and video amplifiers with a little bit of tuning capabilities etc, and the presentation (the screen, audio output etc.) There's not much going on in terms of what the device needs to know to be able to boot.

Fast forward to the newer TVs with a lot of digital "intelligent" boxes in them and you can already start to see bootstrapping time.

Computers (circa80s and so on) have almost always required a lot of time to discover their environment, whether it be the associated hardware to discovering the network they're on.

Nonetheless, the question is a good one. Why not? Part of the reason is that in making devices modular, one incurs a certain need to exchange data to make the device work. The interfaces (e.g., CPU to Video card or CPU to hard disk) continue to remain slow... so at boot up time, there is considerable time taken to repeat these very same actions each time. The second reason has to deal with the operating systems we got out there - Why must they control every aspect of the hardware beneath them? Why couldn't it just be a set of modules where they can send a unified data stream and have the device deal with it. This rant ranges from the IO buffering required for some devices to the management of actual devices for consuming data by the OS. I'm appalled everytime I see how many queues get involved in just sending data in and out of a modern OS.

I'll readily grant that this is just an off the cuff reply - many here have given equally good reasons and the topic deserves much more careful study. Just my humble 2 cents.

Cheers!

Resource contention

I see people posting saying that hardware detection and initialisation is bound to slow things down, and that is true, but its not the whole story.

Whenever you boot a computer, as opposed to a TV set, there are an awful lot of processes going on. Services start up, various configurations and libraries are loaded up. Lots happens and this lots happening contends for one another for the limited resource of I/O, memory and CPU.

Antivirus scans start happening; if you have AV software which scans DLLs or executables on load this will increase the resource contention significantly.

And at every boot things may be slightly different. For one thing, between last reboot and this a virus could have found its way into the system.

Computers are not exactly finite state machines. Every boot will inevitably differ from the last for oh so many reasons.

Its not like a TV where it only has so many states that it could be in at any time and where things don't change between startups.

If you want instant boots, I suggest sticking with a console and playing games and for math use a calculator.

Microsoft Bootvis

Microsoft has a free utility called bootvis that visually shows you were your computer bootup is spending it's time. You can download this utility at: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/System-Tweak/Bo otVis.shtml [softpedia.com] This utility also has some whitepapers with advice on what you can do to speed up your boot times.

The boot speed problem

There are two areas you need to look at on this issue, and to not look at each, you miss possible solutions.

The first area is the BIOS boot time, which has nothing to do with how long it takes Windows to load. On many systems, it takes a while for the BIOS to check for hardware, hard drives, and even devices that may or may not be there before booting. Now, this is an area that many can improve, but in some cases, the BIOS itself will never allow you to tweak things properly.

In the "old days", you had the option to set the drive parameters yourself in the BIOS, and to avoid having the BIOS scan for devices. Or you could do a one-time scan, and it would put in the parameters for you so the system doesn't need to check them every time you boot. I honestly miss that since on most systems today, you need to wait for the system to check what type of hard drives and CD drives you have every time you boot the machine.

Next, you have support for all sorts of devices that many people never use. If you disable the integrated firewire controller(IEEE 1394) for example, there should improve performance. You should be able to disable the integrated audio if you have a sound card as well. Or the floppy controller. There is a LOT of this junk that gets checked every time you boot the system. The sad thing is that it seems the BIOS STILL checks all this unused stuff at boot time. It may be a little faster, but the BIOS still knows the features are there, and it bloats the process. More features are generally not better when it comes to the time it takes the BIOS to finish checking.

So, the BIOS finally lets you boot.

And now, Windows starts to check every last feature in your system so it can set it as a device for Plug and Play. Even if you disable the feature in the BIOS, Windows will find it, and try to get a driver working for it. You may be able to avoid this by using jumpers on the motherboard to disable features rather than the BIOS/CMOS setup, but not always.

Microsoft ships Windows XP and Vista with all sorts of features enabled by default, which increases the load time. You have to love how Microsoft auto-enabled Wireless Zero configuration for every copy of Windows XP, even if you are looking at a desktop system without a wireless card in it. Windows Time, and many other services get turned on by default, and that is where most of the problem comes from as well. If you have Norton Anti-Virus, that will add to it, and Internet Security is worse still.

Now, it's not always the fault of Microsoft, Dell is one of the worst offenders when it comes to "adding features". When you get a Dell, unless you specifically ask them not to pre-load all their garbage, you get Dell support agents, and software to "make it easier for them to help you". What it really does is make them money because they get to sell more hardware when angry customers want to throw their monitor across the room because of stupid garbage like this.

The speed of the hard drive is another thing to look at when it comes to how long it takes to boot. If you have a 4200RPM hard drive, that's slow by the standards of today, but most systems come with either a 4200RPM or 5400RPM hard drive in them, rather than the faster 7200RPM or 10,000RPM drives. You can have two identical machines except for the hard drive, and you will find that a faster hard drive can trim 25 percent off the time it takes to boot.

System memory is the final area that can slow down your boot speed. If you have under 512 megs of system memory, that's too little for Windows XP, and generally you want 1 gig or more of system memory to make Windows XP load and run well. With Vista, this jumps to 1 gig really being required to load/run decently, with 2 gigs for what you really want.

If you have multiple physical hard drives, because of all the above issues, it really does pay to consolidate down to a single drive. I have recently done such a consolidation, going from 4 physical hard drive

Because computers are complicated

Whenever someone says "why can't computers be more like $APPLIANCE", the correct answer is almost always "because computers are much more complicated than $APPLIANCE".

Forget how complicated your computer's hardware is (and I have no doubt that you've read the blurbs about how the latest Intel chip has 80 zillion transisters) and just think about the software. If you go through your computer and you find all the files whose names end with DLL, EXE, DRV or SYS, total up their size and divide that number by 8, that is (very, very roughly) the number of individual parts that makes up the workings of your computer's software layer.

All other human endeavor pales in comparison to that. You shouldn't be complaining that your computer is buggy or slow or bloated or that it takes too long to boot. You should be amazed that it works at all.

(And yes, people are working on making computers start up faster. Someday, someone will do it and it will be another huge, complicated effort that everyone will just sort of take for granted, just like they have every other technological miracle.)