6 ms·
Change to Bios will make for PCs that boot in seconds
- lefstathiou 16y agoI cant tell you how many years I've been hearing this. Wasnt Vista supposed to be almost instant?
- epochwolf 16y agoThe only thing I've found to be "almost instant" is waking up my mac from sleep mode.
- sspencer 16y agoThis and the battery performance while sleeping are, in my opinion, some of the main attractions of macs today.
- sprout 16y agoI've got a Dell Vostro 1510 w/ Vista sitting in front of me, and coming out of sleep is "almost instant."
- epochwolf 16y agoI know plenty of people are happy with Windows 7 and Vista but with me Windows has such a bad history of crashing/hanging while coming out of sleep/hibernation that I can't trust it.
- sprout 16y agoOh, I love Ubuntu and am never happy with anything but, but Windows Vista/7 have parity with Macs on resume, and way outpace Linux (if only because the hardware is built for Windows.) My boss' Vostro was inexplicably hanging on logout/login, that seems to have corrected itself after a few forced reboots. (And I've had that experience a few times on all OS's, including OS X.) Actually, I can't remember it for Linux, but Ubuntu is much less careful about shutting down gracefully than Mac/Windows.
- wvenable 16y agoI don't think it's an issue anymore -- every modern machine I have right now (even a netbook running XP) is flawless coming out of sleep/hibernation. From my experience, the vast majority of windows laptop users almost never shutdown their computers.
- epochwolf 16y agoI've had two machines: an HP DV5000 (AMD/ATI) model and a Macbook Pro. Both of them have not been reliable with sleep mode using a stock Windows XP/Vista install (plus drivers/updates). I haven't tried Windows 7 in sleep mode yet but it's not worth my time to risk losing work. I've only had OSX fail once due to a crash* in sleep mode in 2 years (and over a thousand sleep/wake cycles). * I've had four failures to wake from sleep due to low battery in a 2 month span I was dealing with an old battery that was failing.
- mrshoe 16y agoPressing the home button on an iPad?
- baddox 16y agoWaking my Windows 7 desktop from sleep is almost instant. It takes longer for my LCD monitors' backlights to flick on than for the login screen to appear.
- chadgeidel 16y agoVista (and Windows 7) boot from "hybrid sleep" in less time than it takes my monitor to turn on. Power draw in "hybrid sleep" is negligible (less than the idle power draw of my 2 LCD monitors in sleep mode).
- MichaelGG 16y agoI thought "hybrid sleep" just meant that the machine is in sleep, but it can also transition to hibernation if your battery runs low.
- sathyabhat 16y agoIIRC it transitions into hibernation after 'x' hours of no activity ( I believe x == 6 ), not sure.
- saturdayplace 16y ago> Some PC and laptop makers are already using UEFI Who? I'd be a lot less skeptical about widespread use, if I knew a Dell or an HP were on board with this.
- epochwolf 16y agoDoesn't apple use this already? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface
- jasonkeene 16y agoYeah, Apple has used EFI for quite a while. My laptop still doesn't boot that fast.
- jfb 16y agoI particularly like the floppy disk clip art.
- listic 16y agoWell, BIOS is floppy disk's peer (same age), and it contains code for accessing floppy drive, and in many cases is most easily updated via floppy disk; so this part makes sense. Though today if one is using floppy disk at all, it will most likely be a 3.5" 1.44 MB High Density version, which is much younger than original model that is BIOS peer (maybe it would be more exact to show older 5.25" floppy?) But in general, they belong to the same age.
- cryptoz 16y agoOff topic, but the Microsoft Office 2010 Save icon is still a floppy disk. Crazy. http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/ukschools/WindowsLiveWriter/Top10reasonsOffice2010isgoodforschools_E4DD/image_2.png http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/ukschools/WindowsLiveWriter/...
- andrewf 16y agoI doubt it will ever change. There's a generation of kids growing up right now who think that's an icon which means "save" - they've never seen a floppy.
- Splines 16y agoI wonder how many phrases/icons are there that apply to obsolete technology? One that I can think of off the top of my head: The phrase "you left your phone off the hook" to describe a phone that hasn't been turned off.
- frou_dh 16y agoThere's that ribbed drum lookin' thing that gets used as a database icon.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- frou_dh 16y agoMacs use EFI, don't they? My MBP cold boots fairly quickly, but nothing to write home about.
- modoc 16y agoThrow in a fast SSD and it will blow your socks off!
- frou_dh 16y agoI'll buy a SSD the day a good 512GB one costs less than a month's rent :-)
- modoc 16y agoJust move to NYC or SF and you'll be all set:)
- baddox 16y agoThe cheapest 256GB one on newegg costs about what I pay a month for rent. I must ask, though, why in the world do you need 512GB for your boot drive? The 32GB in my HTPC was 70 USD and is amazing and plenty. My main Windows desktop only has 100 GB used out of 640 (hdd obviously).
- frou_dh 16y agoMy laptop only has one hdd bay. It would be a wasteful to use SSD space for my media collection and big app installs, but the alternative of having an external hdd hanging from the laptop all the time would be a net step backwards as far as I'm concerned. 512 was kneejerk binary; 320 would do :-)
- barrkel 16y agoMy media collection is on my media server. That's got 4x1T+4x1.5T drives in ZFS RAIDZ: a little too much to fit on a laptop. Laptops can get away with ~80G, just about, for Windows 7, and probably less with other OSes. But probably something like the C300 (256G) would be a better choice.
- cskau 16y agoAnyone got some kind of listing of machines using UEFI already ? I checked Wikipedia, but it's quite scarce on concrete info.
- aliguori 16y agoAll recent IBM x86 servers use UEFI.
- frankc 16y agoSolid state drives can boost boot time quite a bit, and there are plenty of metrics online to prove it. I suppose a bios upgrade could improve the time it takes to go from POST to the intial OS bootstrapping, but once you get to the OS loading, I don't see where the bios can make a difference? The OS load time seems to be the biggest bottleneck to me, which is where the solid state fast access times get their big wins.
- bryanlarsen 16y agoMy Ubuntu boots in 5 seconds off an SSD, but the BIOS takes 15 seconds.
- listic 16y agoOf course, we are talking about the time before the OS loading. The fact that it takes seconds to probe and initialize the hardware is totally unnecessary (see my other comment).
- russell 16y agoReminds me of a Science Fiction novel I read, where one of the characters was a starship based super-AI. At the bottom-most layer of software was an emulation of MS-DOS. In software, in the name of backwards-compatibility, our worse mistakes (almost) never die .
- thwarted 16y agoYou must dig up the title to this book!
- pjscott 16y agoOne of the more disturbing things in Portal is that GLaDOS stands for "Genetic Life-form and Disk Operating System." The whole plot of the game revolves around a malevolent and extremely advanced form of DOS.
- prodigal_erik 16y agoAlso reminds me of the "Programmer-Archaeologist" career Vinge described. And that humans' software had long used a low-level clock which was thought to commemorate the first moon landing. (A fair guess, but the epoch chosen was actually in January 1970....)
- listic 16y agoThe fact that it takes seconds to probe and initialize the hardware is totally unnecessary, because any modern OS worth its salt ('BSD, Linux, Mac OS, Windows) will probably do it itself. It is still so because PC hardware manufacturers prefer to retain status quo and not fix what is not broken. This is so with many other things in PC architecture, as well. I.e. take the ATX power connections: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATX. We could be using just one voltage (+12V or other) going to the motherboard long ago. It would simplify electrical design, thereby improving efficiency, thereby simplifying cooling and lowering noise; and lowering costs in the process. But the manufacturers are content with the status quo. If nothing else, the hint that it is the right thing to do is that Google does it: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html, search for "Gigabyte".
- bengl3rt 16y agoMy friend's desktop computer is halfway through bringing up Win 7 before the monitor even warms up... then again he boots off a PCI SSD.
- teilo 16y agoCaveat Lector. Misleading title. This is not talking about OS boot speeds. This is is talking about the time from flipping the switch until the OS begins to load.
- corysama 16y agoI'm still excited by this. Since I installed an SSD boot drive, the bios startup time is half of my boot time.
- peterbessman 16y agoThis is cool, though I think it might be late to the party. Doesn't everyone just suspend/resume these days? Not that it's zero value, but it would have been really noteworthy 5-10 years ago.
- aphexairlines 16y agoUEFI demo on a thinkpad t400: http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=560 http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=560