16 ms·

I had an Atari ST in a closet, and decided to get rid of it a while back. I pulled it out to test it. The boot sequence, all the way to a desktop with a mouse t

by kabdib 7y ago

I had an Atari ST in a closet, and decided to get rid of it a while back. I pulled it out to test it. The boot sequence, all the way to a desktop with a mouse that moves, takes less than one second. If you boot from a hard drive, maybe another second. For a while I just kept hitting the reset button, marveling at the speed at which the ST came up. Most machines I work with these days take minutes to get rolling. Okay, I know that systems are bigger and more complicated now; buses have to be probed and trained, RAM has to be checked, network stuff needs to happen, etc., etc., but minutes? This is just industry laziness, a distributed abdication of respect for users, a simple piling-on of paranoia and "one or two more seconds won't matter, will it?" Story time. A cow-orker of mine use to work at a certain very large credit card company. They were using IBM systems to do their processing, and downtime was very, very, very important to them. One thing that irked them was the boot time for the systems, again measured in minutes; the card company's engineers were pretty sure the delays were unecessary, and asked IBM to remove them. Nope. "Okay, give us the source code to the OS and we'll do that work." Answer: "No!" So the CC company talked to seven very large banks, the seven very large banks talked to IBM, and IBM humbly delivered the source code to the OS a few days later. The CC company ripped out a bunch of useless gorp in the boot path and got the reboot time down to a few tens of seconds. When every second is worth money, you can get results.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
zozbot234 7y ago
> The boot sequence, all the way to a desktop with a mouse that moves, takes less than one second. That's an exceptional case though - the GUI OS was hardwired in ROM. The Amiga was an otherwise comparable machine that had to load much of the OS from disk, and it did take its time to boot to desktop.
- kabdib 7y ago
  Even when the OS was loaded off of a hard drive, the boot time was still about 2-3 seconds (I did measure this). Not really exceptional. It took maybe a minute to load off floppy disk. That is STILL shorter than the POST time for every machine I work with these days, with the possible exception of the Raspberry Pi in the closet.
  - cmrdporcupine 7y ago
    All of Atari ST TOS is 192KB. On a floppy that would take a while to load. Off a hard drive, sure, not too bad.
    - kabdib 7y ago
      About 60-70 seconds, IRRC. It's been a while since I measured it. We did some optimizations, other folks did a better job (e.g., optimally skewing physical sectors so that they'd be hit nearly immediately after a head seek).
      - cmrdporcupine 7y ago
        Hah, I didn't notice it was you who I was responding to. How nice of me to tell you the size of the OS you helped write ;-)
        kabdib 7y ago
        That deserves a story, too. Why not? [Note: this is the early 80s. A computer with a large amount of memory might have 64K in this period. I think a 64K ROM cost about four dollars, and 64K of RAM was about fifty bucks] The Atari ST's operating system (TOS, and no I don't want to talk about what that stands for) was written in C and assembly language. Initially the ST was going to have 128K of ROM; we wanted to one-up the Macintosh (which hadn't shipped yet, but there were rumors and we had copies of Inside Macintosh that were simply fascinating to read) and put both our OS and a version of BASIC in ROM. Most home computers at the time came with some version of BASIC, and the Mac did not; we were hoping that would be a differentiator. Trouble was, nobody had actually sized our software yet (the only things even remotely running were on the 8086, not the 68000 we were going to use, and Digital Research wasn't exactly forthcoming about details anyway). So mid-October (the project started in earnest in July 1984, and FWIW we shipped in late May 1985, a whole new platform starting from zero in less than ten months) we realized that just the OS and GUI would be 128K, and that the BASIC we were thinking of using was like 80K (but could probably be shrunk). So the hardware guys added two more ROM sockets, for 192K of ROM. A month went by. Wups! -- it turned out that the OS and GUI would be like 170K, with little hope of shrinkage. No, make that 180K. Would you take 200K? The code topped out at 210K or so, and that wouldn't even fit into the six ROM sockets we now had. No chance in hell of getting another 64K of ROM -- that stuff costs real money -- so we shrunk the code. The team from Atari came from a background of writing things that fit into really tiny amounts of ROM, so we went about this with a fair amount of glee. We got about 1K per programmer per day of tested code savings by ripping out unused functions, fixing all the places where people had "optimized" things by avoiding the expense of strlen or whatever, and coding some common graphics calls with machine trap instructions instead of fatter JSRs. For about a week, the hallway in engineering was full of people calling out to other offices, "Wow, get a load of this stupid routine!" and in a codebase that had been tossed together as quickly as GEM/TOS had been, there was no lack of opportunity for improvement. We found a fair number of bugs doing this, too. Additionally, the C compiler we were using was not very good, and even its "optimized" code was terrible. Fortunately it had an intermediate assembly language stage, so we wrote some tools to optimize that intermediate code (mostly peephole stuff, like redundant register save/restores) and got a relatively easy 10-12 percent savings. I think we had a few hundred bytes of ROM left on the first release. I remember that 192K pretty darned well. Though they're fun to talk about, I honestly don't miss those days much; today I wrote the equivalent of void *p = malloc( 1024 * 1024 * 1024 ); and I didn't even feel bad.
the8472 7y ago
Corporate windows installations are unnecessarily slow because they run antivirus and all kinds of domain membership stuff in the boot and logon path. A clean install with fast boot and without that gunk takes seconds. A headless linux can come up in seconds (UEFI fast boot + EFI stub) or even less than a second if you're in a VM and don't have to deal with the firmware startup. Booting to a lightweight window manager would only add a few seconds on top.
- sudosysgen 7y ago
  I'm actually relatively confident that you could get it down to 8-9 seconds to the basic X environment with an NVMe SSD and maybe even less if you were to cache some application states.
  - bmn__ 7y ago
    Things are possible if one puts one's mind to it. five seconds, year 2008: https://lwn.net/Articles/299483/ https://lwn.net/Articles/299483/ two seconds, year 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUUtZjd6UA4&t=17 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUUtZjd6UA4&t=17
    - DanBC 7y ago
      And that 5 second boot time was on an Asus EEE 701, which had Intel Celeron M 630 MHz, and just 512 MB ram.
  - nwallin 7y ago
    A few years ago I went about trying to get my laptop to boot as fast as possible. Got it down to 9 seconds from POST completion to X with Chromium running. The only differences between the system I used for benchmarking and my regular desktop was autologin, chromium in the startup script, and the enablement of the benchmarking thing. I'll probably poke around with it tonight and see if it's any different on my new laptop. This one had a proper NVMe as opposed to the m.2 SSD in my old laptop. My Windows desktop at work takes forever to get running. Even after you log in and the desktop is visible it's another minute until it's usable.
throwGuardian 7y ago
An SSD can make a world of difference. Most of the time spent during boot up is in executing random reads (of about 4Kb size) from storage, and SSDs are a factor of magnitude faster there
- kabdib 7y ago
  Sorry, most of a box's boot time is the BIOS and other stuff. The servers I run at work take 3-4 minutes to boot, the last twenty seconds or so is the OS coming up. The consumer PCs I use have a similar ratio. POST time is crazy bad. It's almost like the engineers working on it don't care.
  - Avamander 7y ago
    UEFI Fast boot improves it significantly on modern hardware.
    - maemilius 7y ago
      In all 25 years I've used computers, I can't recall having a PC that took more than a minute to POST. Ever. My current PC's fast boot is fast enough that it looks like the computer turns on and goes straight to Windows. Maybe I've just gotten really lucky...
      - Proziam 7y ago
        All of my machines are the same. From the time I plug in the power cable and hit the go button I can expect to see my desktop in around 10 seconds. It's fast enough that when I'm in discord with coworkers and need to switch OS it doesn't really affect the workflow at all.
        reificator 7y ago
        I'm curious about why a workplace would settle on Discord. Are you in game development, is there a killer feature that Discord has compared to the competition, or was it just what people were comfortable with at home? Not implying that it's bad software, I'm just curious because it sounds unusual.
maccard 7y ago
> Most machines I work with these days take minutes to get rolling. My current Windows 10 machine boots faster than my monitor turns on (<5 seconds from power on to login screen).
- Retric 7y ago
  Login screen is hardly the end of the boot up process. I have had work laptops where I would login then go get a water because it’s going to take several minutes to finish loading.
  - reificator 7y ago
    IMO if there's a meaningful delay beyond the login prompt is the fault of the user/administrator. Not in 100% of cases, there's slower hardware, etc... But most of the time if logging in is slow it's because you have too much set to start with the machine at once, and those things are all fighting over resources that they could otherwise have exclusive access to.
  - maccard 7y ago
    My machine definitely doesn't take multiple minutes after login to load fully. I didn't count after that point because it's really the user (or administrators) fault after that point, and because I have a password which means I'd need to actually time startup, pause, and time login. Also, when do you consider "done"? How can I accurately measure that?
    - Retric 7y ago
      I consider the boot process down when the system is responsive. I can normally open notepad in under a second so IMO that’s a good benchmark for done. As to being the users fault, that’s rather subjective. Video card, printers, and other drivers taking forever to load is really a hardware/OS issue.
bobcostas55 7y ago
The latest AMD CPUs are particularly bad at this, I got a 3600 and for half a year now there are known problems with extremely slow booting. The latest BIOS update made them a bit better but it's still at completely unacceptable levels.
- floatboth 7y ago
  That's very board specific I think, some boards from the first Zen generation also had that problem, but my MSI board boots very quickly
  - anon73044 7y ago
    This. MSI B450 + 3600 and I'm still on bios 7B85v19 SSD is and older 850 EVO and boots to desktop in under 30 seconds
- beckingz 7y ago
  No issue with my 3700. Boots in a second or two.
- qes 7y ago
  I just put a Ryzen 5 3400G in a B450 board and it hits the login screen from cold start in like 3 seconds (and no there's not still a bunch of stuff churning in the background - it's all but done loading at that point).
- NicoJuicy 7y ago
  BIOS update makes me think that it's a motherboard problem. My Ryzen boots within 8 seconds on a b450 Pro motherboard.
gre 7y ago
Have you ever booted an Amiga 500 from floppy disks? I don't know how long it takes, but it's one of the slowest things I can ever remember doing.
j88439h84 7y ago
Great story.
notyourday 7y ago
Several years ago I have done consulting for a large travel booking service that advertises on TV. As strange as it might sound, there's a large artificial delay added between the time the service knows the answer to customer's search and the time the answer is sent to the customer's web browser. The reason for that delay is that the without it the customers do not believe that the service performed an exhaustive search and do not complete the transaction!
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  Also, it stops the client from hammering at the server...but this is a very inelegant way do do it, and devs would rightfully complain of such crude measures, so it might be necessary to frame it differently ;)
gwbas1c 7y ago
My Pixel 3 boots rather fast compared to my Macbook pro, or my Windows desktop that I hardly ever use. I guess it just comes down to priorities. I'm sure if PC specs included "boot time (lower is better,)" we'd see boot times drop quickly.
Aloha 7y ago
I've used 4.3BSD on a VAX 11/780 - and its remarkable to me how similar the experience is, even vi startup times are close. It's weird. I guess some things only go so fast. Similarly, my OS X 10.4 (or 10.5 desktop) laptop boots only marginally slower than my OS X 10.14 laptop.
dwild 7y ago
I took a look at a recording of the Atari ST GUI on Youtube, it didn't seems that fast to resize a basic folder view windows. Who care about boot time when you do it once in a while versus actually using that interface? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1b9kUP0WtI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1b9kUP0WtI
qes 7y ago
> Most machines I work with these days take minutes to get rolling. Minutes? That sounds exaggerated. How powerful was your Atari ST compared to other machines at the time versus the machines you work with these days compared to other machines available? Because I'm not even on a particularly new machine and from a powered off state I'm logged into Windows and starting applications within 5 seconds. And for example that's at 7680x2880 resolution, not 640x400.
- gvjddbnvdrbv 7y ago
  Doesn't windows do a type of hibernate rather than a full shutdown.
  - qes 7y ago
    I see someone mentioned that further down in this thread, but shutdown and reboots are similarly quick for all of my pc's. Even my 12 year old laptop (with SSD) boots Windows 10 in _well_ under a minute, and shuts down and reboots much faster. I also have hibernation disabled, and I've never noticed some obviously large file that might be a hibernation state on my drives (even e.g. removing a drive after a shut down so there was no restart where it could've been deleted).
    - joveian 7y ago
      I thought I had hibernate disabled, but it seems Windows 10 is sneeky about that: https://superuser.com/questions/1096371/why-is-windows-hibernating-when-i-shut-down https://superuser.com/questions/1096371/why-is-windows-hiber... Still it isn't much longer for me to restart after fully shutting down (with a more recent system and SSD), just more time in Windows and less in the BIOS (and shutdown is instant with "fast startup" turned off, which is better for me since I usually pull the plug after turning it off). About 20 seconds (counting myself, not timed). Still not as fast as DOS + Windows 3.1 IIRC, but not too bad for turning it on once or twice a day. I have also noticed the many things that have delays now in places there weren't 30 years ago, but I don't think boot times are the best example of this. I might appreciate the twitter rant if not for the completely incorrect diversion about google maps (you can drag parts of the route to make changes and get exact distance, better than paper maps and with much more details about what is nearby). IMO, computer interfaces should have a tool focus, doing basic tasks quickly and reliably so that users can learn to use it like they would a physical tool (while also not making users do extra work that could be done quickly and reliably). Now everything tries to use the network all the time, adding random delays as well as compromising privacy.

by kabdib 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

zozbot234 7y ago

> The boot sequence, all the way to a desktop with a mouse that moves, takes less than one second. That's an exceptional case though - the GUI OS was hardwired in ROM. The Amiga was an otherwise comparable machine that had to load much of the OS from disk, and it did take its time to boot to desktop.

kabdib 7y ago
Even when the OS was loaded off of a hard drive, the boot time was still about 2-3 seconds (I did measure this). Not really exceptional. It took maybe a minute to load off floppy disk. That is STILL shorter than the POST time for every machine I work with these days, with the possible exception of the Raspberry Pi in the closet.
- cmrdporcupine 7y ago
  All of Atari ST TOS is 192KB. On a floppy that would take a while to load. Off a hard drive, sure, not too bad.
  - kabdib 7y ago
    About 60-70 seconds, IRRC. It's been a while since I measured it. We did some optimizations, other folks did a better job (e.g., optimally skewing physical sectors so that they'd be hit nearly immediately after a head seek).
    - cmrdporcupine 7y ago
      Hah, I didn't notice it was you who I was responding to. How nice of me to tell you the size of the OS you helped write ;-)
      - kabdib 7y ago
        That deserves a story, too. Why not? [Note: this is the early 80s. A computer with a large amount of memory might have 64K in this period. I think a 64K ROM cost about four dollars, and 64K of RAM was about fifty bucks] The Atari ST's operating system (TOS, and no I don't want to talk about what that stands for) was written in C and assembly language. Initially the ST was going to have 128K of ROM; we wanted to one-up the Macintosh (which hadn't shipped yet, but there were rumors and we had copies of Inside Macintosh that were simply fascinating to read) and put both our OS and a version of BASIC in ROM. Most home computers at the time came with some version of BASIC, and the Mac did not; we were hoping that would be a differentiator. Trouble was, nobody had actually sized our software yet (the only things even remotely running were on the 8086, not the 68000 we were going to use, and Digital Research wasn't exactly forthcoming about details anyway). So mid-October (the project started in earnest in July 1984, and FWIW we shipped in late May 1985, a whole new platform starting from zero in less than ten months) we realized that just the OS and GUI would be 128K, and that the BASIC we were thinking of using was like 80K (but could probably be shrunk). So the hardware guys added two more ROM sockets, for 192K of ROM. A month went by. Wups! -- it turned out that the OS and GUI would be like 170K, with little hope of shrinkage. No, make that 180K. Would you take 200K? The code topped out at 210K or so, and that wouldn't even fit into the six ROM sockets we now had. No chance in hell of getting another 64K of ROM -- that stuff costs real money -- so we shrunk the code. The team from Atari came from a background of writing things that fit into really tiny amounts of ROM, so we went about this with a fair amount of glee. We got about 1K per programmer per day of tested code savings by ripping out unused functions, fixing all the places where people had "optimized" things by avoiding the expense of strlen or whatever, and coding some common graphics calls with machine trap instructions instead of fatter JSRs. For about a week, the hallway in engineering was full of people calling out to other offices, "Wow, get a load of this stupid routine!" and in a codebase that had been tossed together as quickly as GEM/TOS had been, there was no lack of opportunity for improvement. We found a fair number of bugs doing this, too. Additionally, the C compiler we were using was not very good, and even its "optimized" code was terrible. Fortunately it had an intermediate assembly language stage, so we wrote some tools to optimize that intermediate code (mostly peephole stuff, like redundant register save/restores) and got a relatively easy 10-12 percent savings. I think we had a few hundred bytes of ROM left on the first release. I remember that 192K pretty darned well. Though they're fun to talk about, I honestly don't miss those days much; today I wrote the equivalent of void *p = malloc( 1024 * 1024 * 1024 ); and I didn't even feel bad.

the8472 7y ago

Corporate windows installations are unnecessarily slow because they run antivirus and all kinds of domain membership stuff in the boot and logon path. A clean install with fast boot and without that gunk takes seconds. A headless linux can come up in seconds (UEFI fast boot + EFI stub) or even less than a second if you're in a VM and don't have to deal with the firmware startup. Booting to a lightweight window manager would only add a few seconds on top.

sudosysgen 7y ago
I'm actually relatively confident that you could get it down to 8-9 seconds to the basic X environment with an NVMe SSD and maybe even less if you were to cache some application states.
- bmn__ 7y ago
  Things are possible if one puts one's mind to it. five seconds, year 2008: https://lwn.net/Articles/299483/ https://lwn.net/Articles/299483/ two seconds, year 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUUtZjd6UA4&t=17 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUUtZjd6UA4&t=17
  - DanBC 7y ago
    And that 5 second boot time was on an Asus EEE 701, which had Intel Celeron M 630 MHz, and just 512 MB ram.
- nwallin 7y ago
  A few years ago I went about trying to get my laptop to boot as fast as possible. Got it down to 9 seconds from POST completion to X with Chromium running. The only differences between the system I used for benchmarking and my regular desktop was autologin, chromium in the startup script, and the enablement of the benchmarking thing. I'll probably poke around with it tonight and see if it's any different on my new laptop. This one had a proper NVMe as opposed to the m.2 SSD in my old laptop. My Windows desktop at work takes forever to get running. Even after you log in and the desktop is visible it's another minute until it's usable.

throwGuardian 7y ago

An SSD can make a world of difference. Most of the time spent during boot up is in executing random reads (of about 4Kb size) from storage, and SSDs are a factor of magnitude faster there

kabdib 7y ago
Sorry, most of a box's boot time is the BIOS and other stuff. The servers I run at work take 3-4 minutes to boot, the last twenty seconds or so is the OS coming up. The consumer PCs I use have a similar ratio. POST time is crazy bad. It's almost like the engineers working on it don't care.
- Avamander 7y ago
  UEFI Fast boot improves it significantly on modern hardware.
  - maemilius 7y ago
    In all 25 years I've used computers, I can't recall having a PC that took more than a minute to POST. Ever. My current PC's fast boot is fast enough that it looks like the computer turns on and goes straight to Windows. Maybe I've just gotten really lucky...
    - Proziam 7y ago
      All of my machines are the same. From the time I plug in the power cable and hit the go button I can expect to see my desktop in around 10 seconds. It's fast enough that when I'm in discord with coworkers and need to switch OS it doesn't really affect the workflow at all.
      - reificator 7y ago
        I'm curious about why a workplace would settle on Discord. Are you in game development, is there a killer feature that Discord has compared to the competition, or was it just what people were comfortable with at home? Not implying that it's bad software, I'm just curious because it sounds unusual.

maccard 7y ago

> Most machines I work with these days take minutes to get rolling. My current Windows 10 machine boots faster than my monitor turns on (<5 seconds from power on to login screen).

Retric 7y ago
Login screen is hardly the end of the boot up process. I have had work laptops where I would login then go get a water because it’s going to take several minutes to finish loading.
- reificator 7y ago
  IMO if there's a meaningful delay beyond the login prompt is the fault of the user/administrator. Not in 100% of cases, there's slower hardware, etc... But most of the time if logging in is slow it's because you have too much set to start with the machine at once, and those things are all fighting over resources that they could otherwise have exclusive access to.
- maccard 7y ago
  My machine definitely doesn't take multiple minutes after login to load fully. I didn't count after that point because it's really the user (or administrators) fault after that point, and because I have a password which means I'd need to actually time startup, pause, and time login. Also, when do you consider "done"? How can I accurately measure that?
  - Retric 7y ago
    I consider the boot process down when the system is responsive. I can normally open notepad in under a second so IMO that’s a good benchmark for done. As to being the users fault, that’s rather subjective. Video card, printers, and other drivers taking forever to load is really a hardware/OS issue.

bobcostas55 7y ago

The latest AMD CPUs are particularly bad at this, I got a 3600 and for half a year now there are known problems with extremely slow booting. The latest BIOS update made them a bit better but it's still at completely unacceptable levels.

floatboth 7y ago
That's very board specific I think, some boards from the first Zen generation also had that problem, but my MSI board boots very quickly
- anon73044 7y ago
  This. MSI B450 + 3600 and I'm still on bios 7B85v19 SSD is and older 850 EVO and boots to desktop in under 30 seconds
beckingz 7y ago
No issue with my 3700. Boots in a second or two.
qes 7y ago
I just put a Ryzen 5 3400G in a B450 board and it hits the login screen from cold start in like 3 seconds (and no there's not still a bunch of stuff churning in the background - it's all but done loading at that point).
NicoJuicy 7y ago
BIOS update makes me think that it's a motherboard problem. My Ryzen boots within 8 seconds on a b450 Pro motherboard.

gre 7y ago

Have you ever booted an Amiga 500 from floppy disks? I don't know how long it takes, but it's one of the slowest things I can ever remember doing.

j88439h84 7y ago

Great story.

notyourday 7y ago

Several years ago I have done consulting for a large travel booking service that advertises on TV. As strange as it might sound, there's a large artificial delay added between the time the service knows the answer to customer's search and the time the answer is sent to the customer's web browser. The reason for that delay is that the without it the customers do not believe that the service performed an exhaustive search and do not complete the transaction!

Piskvorrr 7y ago
Also, it stops the client from hammering at the server...but this is a very inelegant way do do it, and devs would rightfully complain of such crude measures, so it might be necessary to frame it differently ;)

gwbas1c 7y ago

My Pixel 3 boots rather fast compared to my Macbook pro, or my Windows desktop that I hardly ever use. I guess it just comes down to priorities. I'm sure if PC specs included "boot time (lower is better,)" we'd see boot times drop quickly.

Aloha 7y ago

I've used 4.3BSD on a VAX 11/780 - and its remarkable to me how similar the experience is, even vi startup times are close. It's weird. I guess some things only go so fast. Similarly, my OS X 10.4 (or 10.5 desktop) laptop boots only marginally slower than my OS X 10.14 laptop.

dwild 7y ago

I took a look at a recording of the Atari ST GUI on Youtube, it didn't seems that fast to resize a basic folder view windows. Who care about boot time when you do it once in a while versus actually using that interface? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1b9kUP0WtI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1b9kUP0WtI

qes 7y ago

> Most machines I work with these days take minutes to get rolling. Minutes? That sounds exaggerated. How powerful was your Atari ST compared to other machines at the time versus the machines you work with these days compared to other machines available? Because I'm not even on a particularly new machine and from a powered off state I'm logged into Windows and starting applications within 5 seconds. And for example that's at 7680x2880 resolution, not 640x400.

gvjddbnvdrbv 7y ago
Doesn't windows do a type of hibernate rather than a full shutdown.
- qes 7y ago
  I see someone mentioned that further down in this thread, but shutdown and reboots are similarly quick for all of my pc's. Even my 12 year old laptop (with SSD) boots Windows 10 in _well_ under a minute, and shuts down and reboots much faster. I also have hibernation disabled, and I've never noticed some obviously large file that might be a hibernation state on my drives (even e.g. removing a drive after a shut down so there was no restart where it could've been deleted).
  - joveian 7y ago
    I thought I had hibernate disabled, but it seems Windows 10 is sneeky about that: https://superuser.com/questions/1096371/why-is-windows-hibernating-when-i-shut-down https://superuser.com/questions/1096371/why-is-windows-hiber... Still it isn't much longer for me to restart after fully shutting down (with a more recent system and SSD), just more time in Windows and less in the BIOS (and shutdown is instant with "fast startup" turned off, which is better for me since I usually pull the plug after turning it off). About 20 seconds (counting myself, not timed). Still not as fast as DOS + Windows 3.1 IIRC, but not too bad for turning it on once or twice a day. I have also noticed the many things that have delays now in places there weren't 30 years ago, but I don't think boot times are the best example of this. I might appreciate the twitter rant if not for the completely incorrect diversion about google maps (you can drag parts of the route to make changes and get exact distance, better than paper maps and with much more details about what is nearby). IMO, computer interfaces should have a tool focus, doing basic tasks quickly and reliably so that users can learn to use it like they would a physical tool (while also not making users do extra work that could be done quickly and reliably). Now everything tries to use the network all the time, adding random delays as well as compromising privacy.