I was reading an article in the NYTimes about next generation computers having very fast booting times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/technology/26boot.html?ref=technology I've checked my two laptops with the following results: Asus W2P, Vista Ultimate32 SP1 booting time to see the desktop - 45seconds, shutting down 35 seconds. Compaq B 3800, XP Home SP3 booting time to see the desktop - 60 seconds, shutting down 15 seconds. Obviously after seeing the desktop I have to wait another 10-15 seconds before multitasking. The article mentions a software "DeviceVM, the maker of a fast-boot program called Splashtop" does anyone know anything about it?
I don't know what the standard is now on new PCs, but on mine, Vistax64 boots in 39 seconds, XPx64 boots in about 40, and Linux varies from distro to distro, but seems similar. OzOS took 39 I think, and Ubuntu around the same. Personally, I don't much care how long it takes to boot, cause once it does, I'm up for days without a reboot. So waiting even a minute or so is no big deal for me. Shutdown is usually pretty fast, much faster than what you mentioned above. XPx64 for instance, shuts down almost instantly..... Vista takes longer.
XP Home SP3 Intel CoreDuo 1.6 GHz, 1GB RAM laptop. Boot time: 33 secs until I see the desktop (password entry included) 50 seconds from power-up until conected to my WiFi network and ready to work. Shutdown time: 10 seconds
How long it takes to boot up and shutdown times doesn't matter that much, unless the user constantly restarts for some reason. What's sad is that even when the OS itself does both fairly quick, by the time the PCs vendor gets done adding all their garbage software, there's nothing quick about it anymore. My PC has 4 operating systems installed. Boot time is 55 seconds from powered off to ready to use. It took 1:15 from shut down to online at this site. 15-20 seconds of that is used by the BIOS. Bootup used to take 40-45 seconds total until I added a 3rd hard drive. Not sure why that drive slows the BIOS times so much. Desktop is visible in 40-45 seconds. The PC shuts down in 7 seconds. It's a shame that the current operating systems are so bloated that it takes such powerful hardware to get a respectable boot time. The old operating systems could boot up in those times on far slower hardware. I got these times using a 9 year old HP with a 366MHZ Celeron, running 98SE. I'd like to see what kind of boot time I'd get using a 1.5-2GHZ processor.
Probably due to the fact that the sata interface supports a higher data transfer rate. If my memory serves me well ide's max was 133mb/s where as sata can be anywhere from 150-300mb/s. Future sata drives are predicted to hit 600mb/s!!
The manual for a Gigabyte mobo (EP45T-DSR3) says that correctly entering the BIOS settings IDE channels to "None" if there are no IDE/SATA devices on the channel will skip the detection of the device during the POST for faster system startup. I believe I've read elsewhere that the same thing applies to unused network connectors, too.
I believe the OP is talking about SSDs which is basically a method of hibernation or the same thing as keeping the OS info in RAM so its ready to use right away. There are registry tweaks you can use to decrease start up and shutdown times in Vista. It takes me about 25 seconds to get to my desktop in Vista on my laptop.
Bootup time for my XP desktop (booting off a WD 640GB Green) is roughly 35 seconds until I can click and launch programs. It loads stuff like AVG, rivatuner, razer drivers, color calibration software and more stufff, so I am sure the times can be cut down if I remove some of these from the startup.
