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Why Do Computers Take So Long to Boot Up?
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Dec 10, 2006 08:48 PM
from the tired-hampsters dept.
from the tired-hampsters dept.
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?"
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Why Do Computers Take So Long to Boot Up?
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hum (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.etrangementmoelleux.info/)
Re:hum (Score:5, Informative)
Or linux with 'init=/bin/sh'. Only takes a couple of seconds on my machine.
Re:hum (Score:5, Funny)
(http://selfindulgenttravelblog.blogspot.com/)
Re:hum (Score:5, Informative)
Re:hum (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.uberm00.net/ | Last Journal: Monday January 19 2004, @09:27PM)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday April 22 2003, @12:52AM)
Re:hum (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Sunday September 24 2006, @11:23AM)
Re:hum (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Friday March 31 2006, @10:51PM)
Re:hum (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://runawayjim.org/ | Last Journal: Saturday December 21 2002, @02:25AM)
Re:hum (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Thursday August 05 2004, @12:16AM)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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... (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.triwizard.net/)
Or maybe you are.
--S (not that you'll find SAS in laptops, but hey, this is slashdot.)
Re:hum (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.fredshome.org/)
And it never crashes either. Those computer things are like magic.
Re:hum (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.remmelt.com/)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.geocodeengine.com/)
Not just memory and registers (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:TVs don't need to do very much (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www-cdf.fnal.gov/ | Last Journal: Wednesday June 13, @11:39AM)
Come on. Look square at the issue. (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.ideaspike.com/ | Last Journal: Monday October 22, @04:43AM)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
(http://pasamio.id.au/)
Re:Hibernate (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.taupehat.com/ | Last Journal: Monday July 17 2006, @07:24PM)
Re:Hibernate (Score:4, Interesting)
Vista's lack of EFI support is a real sign of MS's misplaced priorities, imho.
Re:Errr.... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://hur.st/)
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.... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Errr.... (Score:5, Informative)
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...