Windows 8 ultra fast cold boot preview

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Mickz

I had a chance to try Win8 on my CarPC MB. Clean install onto a new SATA3 SSD. Don’t have a SATA3 cable and not sure if it really makes a difference but they are low cost so I’ll get one anyway.

From “Loading Windows” or whatever Win8 says, to a fully set desktop is 7 seconds.
I had trouble with Hibernate, just would not work and always hung. Sleep was fine.

Anyway I didn’t have time to look any further, quick format of the drive and installed Win7-64.
From “Loading Windows” to a fully set desktop is the same as Win8 at 7 seconds.

Resume from Hibernate is 7 seconds, both Win8 and Win7 with 4GB of ram.

Wake from sleep is of course the same at 1.8 seconds.

Quote: “Enter Phoenix’s new Instant Boot BIOS. It cuts down the post time to roughly one second.”

Now, if I can get a MB with that Phoenix Bios I’ll have a 9 second cold boot to windows. I’m allowed to dream, aren’t I?

BTW. Current post time is around 15 seconds.

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Obviously, resume is going to be more or less identical since all your doing is reading from disk to ram. But the cold boot brings up an important point. I've now run Win8 on several different machines and a couple of tablets. Where you're likely to see the most improvement is on lower-powered machines. My i5 SATA3 ssd carpc boots to Win7 (32bit) desktop in well under 10 seconds from post (20 seconds from button push). I wouldn't expect Win8 to be much faster than that. But on my old Dell Laptop, the difference is almost a minute. On my Atom-based tablet, it's quite a bit faster, too.

I'm using Win8 as my day-to-day OS on the laptop and getting a feel for how it all works as a "normal" OS (not touchscreen), since that's how millions of folks will be using it. Some good, some bad, definitely NOT a finished product. In this scenario, Metro is nothng but a gigantic version of the start menu, and honestly not all that useful. But I do like IE10, and overall the system remains very stable. WE'll see how things go as the system matures.

VegasGuy

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Mickz

I had a chance to try Win8 on my CarPC MB. Clean install onto a new SATA3 SSD. Don’t have a SATA3 cable and not sure if it really makes a difference but they are low cost so I’ll get one anyway.

From “Loading Windows” or whatever Win8 says, to a fully set desktop is 7 seconds.
I had trouble with Hibernate, just would not work and always hung. Sleep was fine.

Anyway I didn’t have time to look any further, quick format of the drive and installed Win7-64.
From “Loading Windows” to a fully set desktop is the same as Win8 at 7 seconds.

Resume from Hibernate is 7 seconds, both Win8 and Win7 with 4GB of ram.

Wake from sleep is of course the same at 1.8 seconds.

Quote: “Enter Phoenix’s new Instant Boot BIOS. It cuts down the post time to roughly one second.”

Now, if I can get a MB with that Phoenix Bios I’ll have a 9 second cold boot to windows. I’m allowed to dream, aren’t I?

BTW. Current post time is around 15 seconds.

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A board with UEFI will take about 1 second to get past the post screen. All of my systems have roughly the same boot times except for the E350M1, which literally blows away the competition. Resuming from hibernation is just about as fast as my others coming out of the sleep state.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kegobeer

A board with UEFI will take about 1 second to get past the post screen. All of my systems have roughly the same boot times except for the E350M1, which literally blows away the competition. Resuming from hibernation is just about as fast as my others coming out of the sleep state.

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Great to hear, looks like I‘ll be looking for another motherboard before long. At the moment sleep is rock solid, but having a 9 to 10 sec cold boot or hibernate-resume would be almost nothing when/if sleep fails, I may even drop sleep as it would make my installation a lot simpler.

VegasGuy Interesting but not surprising that W8 would benefit older Hardware in load times.
That offers hope for some older systems without the expense of a hardware upgrade as well. I felt the same about the current state of Metro, but as you say, early days.

I'm using Metro on my X201T Tablet PC (with multitouch) and I'm counch surfing more often than not with my "heavy" mini notebook sized PC than with my iPad 1. The iPad looks more and more like a toy now. I never couch surfed with my tablet (it's was supposed to be in the truck) but now I can't wait to get it. I play with CF settings, RR, then switch to Metro and glance at my facebook and twitter accounts, market, then go back to the awesome IE10. Windows 7 in the same tablet was not nearly as responsive, web browsing was not responsive, pdf reading was not responsive, pdf annotating (what I do most of the day) was not that responsive or practical. The pen is also great, but I missed the floating keyboard/hand writing input that would pop out appropriately when needed. Haven't figure out how to make it work again the way it does in Win7.

What surprised me MOST about windows 8 is how much closer it feels to touch to scroll, pinch, zoom, rotate with your fingers. Very close to the iOS and much better than on Android (my experience is limited to the GTab and Nook Color, still...). I though there were something special about the iPad touchscreen hardware but now I think it's all about code. Because the same computer running win7 vs win8, as far as touchscreen goes, it's like running a single core Athlon vs.running a quad core i7...the seat of the pants feel difference looks that dramatic.

Lots of quirks here and there I don't like. Apart from the keyboard, I'd like to use some hard buttons for menu/back/search. I have 4 buttons on my tablet screen, I have yet to figure out how to set them to do that. THen it's going to be no difference than a tablet, only with a ridiculouly short battery life, heavy and hot :-) ...where's the ARM?


I'm going to tell you, I'm going to be the first one to buy an ARM running windows 8. It's very good.

I'm running Windows 7 Pro on a Samsung Series 9 laptop/ultrabook (clean installed to remove the partitioning and bloatware put in place from the factory) and it only takes 3-5 seconds to get to the login screen on a cold boot (disregarding the dual boot menu I currently have).

If you go into MSCONFIG, the boot tab, check the box for "No GUI boot" (which only gets rid of the startup animation, by the way), you'll shave anywhere from three to five seconds off your Windows 7 boot times. This, combined with disabling a few services (such as print spooler and UPNP) was all I've done to speed it up.

Hi Enki, nice one, a lot of Laptops really do have optimised POST/BIOS times but on my UEFI MB the POST time is still around 7 seconds and it appear to be because a generic MB needs to support various HW and uses (or the UEFI BIOS programmers are not very good). FYI Removing the GUI in WIN8 (I know you use Win7) made no difference to my 4 Second Win8 Load time.