20 ms·

Recently I went through the attic and found an old laptop (120Mhz CPU, 32Mb RAM, low-RPM 810Mb HDD) with Win98 installed on in. To my amazement it could boot an

Recently I went through the attic and found an old laptop (120Mhz CPU, 32Mb RAM, low-RPM 810Mb HDD) with Win98 installed on in. To my amazement it could boot and start Excel and Word within 10sec. Compared to my workstation (20 cores + HT @ 2.5Ghz, 110Gb RAM, PCIe SSD) which takes upward of 40 sec to get to the desktop. Really makes one question the current state of software. Sure, Win7 has some more features, but imagine someone in 98 saying: "we have a great idea for a new OS, it'll have more features than Win98 and it'll only take 4 times longer to boot if you are running it on a cluster of supercomputers, but those new features are gonna be worth it" =P Sidenote on the hardware side: The laptop had a hinge for the keyboard so you could raise it to a 20 degree angle, the CD/Floppy drive had the same connector as the battery so you could swap the drive for another battery if going on a trip. There were two sliding switches for backlight and speaker-volume. Access to the internals via a simple latch. It may have been a brick but it had interesting ideas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_760 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_760

Yhippa 6y ago
When I was a kid I remember thinking that if it took 20 seconds to boot now, how fast would it be in 20 years when hardware got significantly better. Fast forward to now and I'll hit the power button, go do some stuff for a few minutes, and then finally use the damn thing.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Otoh, linux used to take forever to boot compared to windows, now its speedier than windows.
  - theodric 6y ago
    In 2001 I could go from LILO to idling WindowMaker in 12 seconds, far faster than Win2k or XP or any of the earlier DOS-based Windowses
  - robryan 6y ago
    It really depends what is running. By default on Ubuntu at least it has a service that is blocking waiting for a network connection.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      Hmm, i dont run ubuntu, but what happens if the wifi is down? That seems exceptionally silly.
      - toast0 6y ago
        It used to be you could hit ctrl-c to stop waiting for dhcp. But last time I ran into that on Debian, you just had to wait for it to give up; of course that was also waiting for dhcp on a wired NIC that wasn't even plugged in. That was quite a few years ago, I'd hope it got better, but it was one of the things that made me decide to move to FreeBSD.
  - jonathanstrange 6y ago
    Not on my machine. Windows 10 takes just a few seconds (fast boot disabled because of dual boot), whereas Linux Mint takes around 20 seconds. Maybe it's because I have many USB devices attached. It doesn't matter but shutdown matters a lot on dual boot systems, and unfortunately Linux Mint sometimes takes minutes to restart. I believe it's related to systemd and it's very annoying (sometimes I need to switch quickly because I take Zoom calls on Windows).
    - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
      What machine? I've got a 16GB i7 SurfacePro, seems to take minutes compared to other computers I use. Windows updates still take hours and still sometimes need multiple reboots vs Kubuntu which updates whilst in use and barely ever needs rebooting. Having come back to MS Win (for work) after a decade+ away, and with an MS produced computer I was expecting to be blown away by the speed. Aside: have you tried systemd-analyze blamw, very useful for diagnosing boot slowdowns; https://www.commandlinux.com/man-page/man1/systemd-analyze.1.html https://www.commandlinux.com/man-page/man1/systemd-analyze.1...
      - jonathanstrange 6y ago
        It's a 1800x Amd system with 32GB Ram, main partition on SSD, /home on harddisk. Windows updates take minutes, Linux updates are usually even faster (except for upgrades which are much slower than Windows upgrades). I'll try that analyzer. But I don't think the boot is slowed down, it's just a bit slower than Windows. Shutdown takes minutes, though.
  - AshamedCaptain 6y ago
    I agree. Even when Windows has "fast startup" enabled, the time from POST to actual desktop in Linux is still better and has improved significantly, and Windows still has that "tends to go slower as you start to install stuff on it". These days I can usually reach Gnome even before my _monitors_ have had time to boot.
    - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
      I used to like how KDE could load a session in the background so when you logged in it was ready: for me the post-login takes as long as boot; which makes it annoying. Not as bad as it used to be when the audio tape failed after 20 mins, but still.
- moron4hire 6y ago
  What kind of janky jalopies are you folks running? It takes my machine all of ten seconds to boot, wait for me to enter my pin, and load the desktop fully.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    I commented above but I think it's because they're still on Windows 7. Significant improvements were made in Windows 10
    - notriddle 6y ago
      Corporate spyware. I have two laptops. One I own, with Windows 10, and one from work, also with Windows 10. Both Thinkpads, but not the same model. I own the cheaper one. It’s faster.
  - TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
    Yeah... I mean, I bag on Windows as much as the next Linux zealot, but my Win10 gaming machine -- still an Athlon64 -- boots from cold start to usable desktop in 5 seconds. It ONLY plays Civ V, but still.
    - pezezin 6y ago
      Honest question, how do you play Civ 5 on an Athlon64? I played a couple of games on my Ryzen 2700X and the end game was unbearably slow, each turn took several minutes.
      - TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
        It runs pretty well on medium settings at 1080p. I have to move the world around a little sometimes to get the tiles to paint. So it’s not great, but turns only take a few seconds. Unfortunately, my $4,000 MBP with a Vega 20 runs it only a little better, so I keep playing it on the PC to save the thermal wear.
  - spookthesunset 6y ago
- slacktide 6y ago
  My work computer is like that. It takes a while to reconnect to all the servers and get the corporate spyware up and running. My Windows 10 PC goes from cold/dark to ready for use in, well, 20 seconds. I keep it lean. My 1982 TI99/4a can go from boot to running a program in about 1.5 seconds, if you can hit “2” as soon as the program selector screen shows. SOLID STATE SOFTWARE
  - muxator 6y ago
    You have my upvote for "corporate spyware" :)
- ryandrake 6y ago
  My Commodore 64 from the early 80s booted near instantly. Maybe 1 or 2 seconds. This was a cold boot from zero--no hibernation or standby. How far we have regressed!
  - michrassena 6y ago
    I didn't realize at the time how fortunate I was to have a Tandy 1000HX when I was growing up. It was one of the only PCs I'm aware of which had DOS in ROM. Of course you were stuck with DOS 2.2 or something. But startup times were beyond almost every device I've used since, and certainly miles ahead of any PC. Here's a quick demo from a similar Tandy model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaSkda4XW3k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaSkda4XW3k
    - kiwijamo 6y ago
      Acorn also had RISC OS in ROM. Booted in about two seconds. Yes it was tricky when you had to upgrade but I suspect the constraints made the ROMs better quality. Certainly was rare to come across bugs etc and the performance was miles ahead of the current software we have today.
      - goatgoatgoat 6y ago
        I upgrade the OS for an Acorn A3000 around 30 years ago. It wasn't too bad. Carefully remove the old ROMs from their sockets and carefully push the new ROMs into the now empty sockets. Quickest OS upgrade I've ever done.
      - RantyDave 6y ago
        Fun fact! Risc OS is some quasi open source these days - ie you can see the source. It's in ARM assembler.
    - stonogo 6y ago
      The IBM PS/1 had MS-DOS 4.01 in ROM. You could install newer versions on the hard drive, but I remember being bitterly disappointed on installing the 2.5MB RAM expansion, because the memory test slowed the boot process down tremendously.
- raydev 6y ago
  Sounds like you're still running a spinning hard drive? I have two PCs, one with a 2.5" SSD and another with an m.2, both are ready to use with 10-15 seconds of cold boot. But cold boot usually isn't necessary, since they sleep just fine.
  - spockz 6y ago
    I’m not sure it is necessarily the drives. My hexacore desktop spends more time in POST (or how it is called these days in uefi) than in windows boot. It takes 3s from loading the boot partition to when I can enter my password and about 20-30s before it actually decides to boot the windows EFI rom.
- avereveard 6y ago
  What annoys me isn't boot time per se, but the sluggines that permains after login as the services-not-services start up and one after another try to steal bandwidth from a WiFi that isn't yet connected. If I could wait whatever time and then log into a usable system it'd be fine, but no, it's a minute after login before I'm in control of local resources
jacquesm 6y ago
My old BBC Micro would go from 'on' to 'prompt' in under the time it would take my hand to move to the keyboard. But then again it had a lot less in terms of hardware to deal with, memory to test and so on.
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  In fact the BBC Micro would “boot” in the time it takes to play two musical notes, one octave and a tone apart (double-length-B, short-C, geddit?!) To be fair to PCs the DFS prompt was more like a boot-loader than an OS.
  - jlarcombe 6y ago
    Hah I never noticed that those were those notes! I believe that's just a remarkable coincidence because the first, lower note is just the result of the SN76489 sound chip being powered up but "uninitialised", as it were. In theory different chips would give different tones but in practice all the ones they used seemed to give a consistent result.
wvenable 6y ago
> which takes upward of 40 sec to get to the desktop. My ancient Core i5 with a whopping 4 cores gets to the Windows 10 desktop in just a few seconds. The truth is that people care much more about features than performance -- especially system/app start up performance. Microsoft has always bet on Moore's law -- building software just not quite usable on modern hardware knowing that eventually hardware will catch up. Anyone designing software for today is immediately behind tomorrow.
baud147258 6y ago
weird, I got a much smaller workstation (like dual core and 10 Gb of RAM) and I get to the desktop in ~ 10 seconds. Maybe Windows is spinning up each core one after the other?
- Macha 6y ago
  It's less likely to be the amount of cores but rather the amount of RAM actually.
rkagerer 6y ago
My first computer was a TRS-80 and it booted faster than any computer I've owned since.
astrange 6y ago
In my experience as a performance engineer, slow performance in things like boot isn't because of "bloat", it's just because of random bugs that may or may not correlate to having added more features. There is a tradeoff in development time between features and bug fixing of course.
Macha 6y ago
I had that for a while on my Arch Linux install. Then I set up full disk encryption. So now of my 45s boot, 20s is me typing the password, 20s is running the luks kdf, and 5s is the entire rest of the boot process.
CardenB 6y ago
I think mainly we have shifted to just never turning off computers and optimizing for standby.
darren_ 6y ago
Counterpoint: Boot time is basically irrelevant once you have a reliable sleep/hibernate/whatever mode. My PC only reboots for windows updates or if I'm troubleshooting some inexplicable behaviour. For the actual practical use case of sitting down at the computer and starting to use it, my PC wakes up essentially instantly. I simply don't care about boot time. My 2021 experience is far, far better than my 1998 one (well, the computer bits at least).
- ergot_vacation 6y ago
  Mostly agree. I will concede boot time is a bit slow on 10 for me, but still faster than 95 was, and yes, it doesn't matter much because of the incredible uptime. 95 would often crash multiple times PER DAY. Meanwhile I just had my Win 10 system do an honest to goodness hard blackscreen crash a few days ago, and it was probably the first in months. For what it's worth, I'm sure you could get the "boot" of a Win 10 machine down to almost nothing if you really wanted to. Mostly it's just not worth it.
- kiwijamo 6y ago
  I remember when even a cold start would drop me into a working desktop within a few seconds. Thus was in the early 90's with RISC OS running on the early days of ARM chips. Respectfully I would argue hibernation and suspend are just a band-aid for the sorry state of hardware and software today. What if we didn't need hibernation or suspend?
  - wazoox 6y ago
    My Pop_OS laptop cold boots from button press to login in 8s.
    - arendtio 6y ago
      How much time of these 8s is spend in EFI? When I look at my PC it is so painful to see, that it actually spends more time with EFI than with the OS: $ systemd-analyze Startup finished in 7.859s (firmware) + 1.203s (loader) + 1.683s (kernel) + 1.356s (initrd) + 1.431s (userspace) = 13.534s
winrid 6y ago
If you're using Win7, it's not taking full advantage of your SSD to boot fast. Win8/10 will boot much faster.
- convery 6y ago
  I have used Win10 as well, about the same boot time.
  - nikau 6y ago
    Not sure what you are doing, my win 10 box boots to desktop in around 10 seconds if that
    - omegabravo 6y ago
      My personal Window 10 box boots within 10 seconds. My corporate laptop takes an eternity despite being more powerful. I suspect configuration (software and hardware) has a massive impact which is being glossed over.
      - nikau 6y ago
        Well yes, corporate machines are a different issue. I have a corporate mac that's sluggish due to mcafee chewing 100% CPU for 5 minute intervals, anything with "enterprise" management software on it is going to suck regardless of OS.
        hyperman1 6y ago
        Just wait until you see windows 10 on a 2GB machine with mcafee, and then corona forces ms teams on it. Boot takes 15 minutes to usable. Usable means msword produces a character on the screen in less than 10 seconds after you type it. IT closed the users ticket without action: As long as it boots in 15 minutes or less, there is no performance problem.
        lanstin 6y ago
brundolf 6y ago
I was trying to figure out why your experience is so much different from mine until I noticed you said "Win7" You should try Windows 10. They made dramatic improvements to the boot time and my (significantly less beefy) desktop cold-boots in <10s.
- chemmail 6y ago
  Some optimized laptops are pretty insane. I just got an Asus G14 with a Ryzen 4900HS, the UEFI boot is animated and has a slicing sound and gets into desktop in maybe 5 seconds. I think I can even change the boot animation with the "ROG" button and can make the lid lights dance around unlike the lame Apple logo.
  - rubatuga 6y ago
    windows 10 actually does "fast startup" which is kind of like hibernation, similar to hybrid sleep introduced in the past.
- lou1306 6y ago
  They did, but they had to turn "shutdown" into some kind of "hibernate on steroid". Doing a clean boots takes a bit longer. And we're talking modern, SSD-equipped machines vs. old laptops with spinning disks.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    Shutdown, Hibernate, and Sleep are three different things. I'm talking about a proper shutdown; I almost never even bother with Hibernate because a regular cold boot is fast enough
    - nullify88 6y ago
      I don't think you understand the comment parent made. Windows 10 comes with a feature called Fast Boot and it is usually enabled by default depending on RAM, driver support etc. What used to be a "proper shutdown" is now a hybrid hybernate. Parts of the OS in particular related to bootup are stored in a hybernation file which is loaded at boot time resulting in faster boots. This is because Windows can now skip driver init and load state from previous boots.
chubot 6y ago
A similar thing that really opened my eyes: running Windows XP in VirtualBox on a $999 Macbook Air from 2016. It really flies!!! It's fast to boot up and fast to use. It's more usable than the host OS !!! It even recognizes some USB devices quite well and has drivers. In 2021, the host OS of my Macbook Air has somehow rotted, even though I installed like 4 programs on it ever, and I barely use it (I use Linux for almost all tasks). Everything is slow, with both jank and "intended" animations. On the other hand, virtualized Windows XP is extremely responsive. It also runs in a tiny amount of RAM -- I think I can set the VirtualBox VM to 256 MB RAM or something (don't quote me on that) This Macbook Air has 8 GB of RAM and it's slow. I think when I got it in 2016, it was decently fast. Somehow in 2021 all the updates made it slow to a crawl. As always iTunes is a big offender. Somehow playing MP3s has to be a chore. I think Spotlight is another offender and that's something that Windows XP didn't have. I use Ubuntu for my Linux desktop, and it has similar problems. There's lag everywhere and it uses a ton of RAM. It's not more usable from a UI perspective. I see a lot of "lateral" progress, although to be fair Ubuntu from 10-15 years ago was pretty bad (definitely less usable than Windows), and they have made progress.
slavik81 6y ago
That does amaze me. I remember booting taking ages on my 166MHz Windows 98 machine. I'd press the power button and go do something else while it booted.
- Tenoke 6y ago
  What used to get me was that I'd have to reboot on nearly every install/update/significant change to my PC, thus waiting hours total on just booting every month.
  - spookthesunset 6y ago
    Not to mention just maintenance reboots because eventually the computer would just get nutty if you didn’t periodically reboot it. Some time around windows 2000 or perhaps even Vista was when you finally could run the OS for weeks without rebooting.
- TheHypnotist 6y ago
  Seriously. From powered off to being on the internet (56k) it was like 5 minutes. Now with my SSD and modern broadband it's about 5 seconds.
  - AshamedCaptain 6y ago
    It is incredible how much people's "perceptions" are altered after a mere 20 years.
ABS 6y ago
I found my old 1999 T20 last year and it took around 30 seconds to boot into Win95. I've got a video: https://twitter.com/capotribu/status/1262021068690259968 https://twitter.com/capotribu/status/1262021068690259968 Pentium III 547 Mhz, 256 MB RAM, 12GB disk Sadly don't remember if this video is from cold start or from hibernation
- rubatuga 6y ago
  definitely hibernation
  - ABS 6y ago
    I think so considering the message on screen
- jonathanlydall 6y ago
  That looks like Windows XP based on the desktop icons and I'm quite sure that Windows 95 didn't support hibernation, it only arrived with Windows 2000 if I recall correctly. Windows XP only came out in 2001, so if the laptop was from 1999 then it must have been upgraded to Windows XP at some point. That text based progress bar shows exclusively for resume from hibernate, hence rubatuga saying it's "definitely hibernation".
  - ABS 6y ago
    indeed it looks like I posted the wrong one!
  - Narishma 6y ago
    I think it's Windows 2000. Unless Windows XP has that same text mode loading screen, which I don't remember.
    - AshamedCaptain 6y ago
      That is XP. Seriously, just look at the icons.... And yes, XP has exactly the same boot screen. It just goes significantly faster than on 2k, which means most of the time you didn't get to see it.
AshamedCaptain 6y ago
There is NO WAY an HDD laptop boots Windows 98 in 10 seconds. Even booting Windows 98 in a VM on a 1yr old processor backed by _friggin RAM_ takes slightly more than that. Windows 98 used to take 1-3 minutes to boot on that level of hardware. And if you had any type of network, it was probably even more than 3 minutes. There is a reason hibernation (even at the BIOS level) was all the rage these days. For better or worse, MS did something on Windows during the XP era that finally made it be able to boot fast (on modern hardware at least). Win2K still has insanely long "delays".
- madpata 6y ago
  Maybe has something to do with cached driver configuration, but I don't know which version of Windows introduced it. It has to do with remembering which drivers were loaded the last time the OS ran and loading those first on reboot. Saves time on checking the whole driver catalog.
  - AshamedCaptain 6y ago
    I remember at the time some propaganda about XP doing "concurrent initialization" for some drivers. My impression is they just fine-tuned some of the IO delay loops (or equivalent). Most of the Win2k boottime is spent with no CPU or disk usage. XP is way more efficient at that.
albertzeyer 6y ago
Well, my current workstation boots in about 5 seconds, and it is not so special (NVM SSD, Linux/Ubuntu). Maybe you misconfigured sth? I remember that I once had something bad in my systemd services, which caused a long hang waiting for nothing and then failing after 1 min timeout. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1234713/why-slow-startup-boot-process-and-how-to-fix https://askubuntu.com/questions/1234713/why-slow-startup-boo...
- distances 6y ago
  Cold boot? My computer doesn't show even the first BIOS screen in first five seconds.
  - qorrect 6y ago
    Same, and Im running AMD Threadripper 3970x, 32gigs of RAM and an nVME. It takes almost 60 seconds to load.
    - GordonS 6y ago
      Hmm, that sounds quite a lot longer than I'm used to these days. I just checked, and I'm 17s from cold boot to Windows 10 login prompt on my Ryzen 2600 desktop with NVMe boot drive. I also checked on one of my 5 year-old HP Zbook G3 (Xeon E3, 64GB RAM, NVMe boot drive), and it was 23s - and that's a corporate machine, loaded with crap.
  - albertzeyer 6y ago
    Yes, cold boot. There were some options in the BIOS (or EFI? I forgot) to skip some things, and to reduce this wait time for the BIOS hotkey.
- shortlived 6y ago
  SSD + Xubuntu + refurbished Dell optiplex FTW!

Yhippa 6y ago

When I was a kid I remember thinking that if it took 20 seconds to boot now, how fast would it be in 20 years when hardware got significantly better. Fast forward to now and I'll hit the power button, go do some stuff for a few minutes, and then finally use the damn thing.

bawolff 6y ago
Otoh, linux used to take forever to boot compared to windows, now its speedier than windows.
- theodric 6y ago
  In 2001 I could go from LILO to idling WindowMaker in 12 seconds, far faster than Win2k or XP or any of the earlier DOS-based Windowses
- robryan 6y ago
  It really depends what is running. By default on Ubuntu at least it has a service that is blocking waiting for a network connection.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    Hmm, i dont run ubuntu, but what happens if the wifi is down? That seems exceptionally silly.
    - toast0 6y ago
      It used to be you could hit ctrl-c to stop waiting for dhcp. But last time I ran into that on Debian, you just had to wait for it to give up; of course that was also waiting for dhcp on a wired NIC that wasn't even plugged in. That was quite a few years ago, I'd hope it got better, but it was one of the things that made me decide to move to FreeBSD.
- jonathanstrange 6y ago
  Not on my machine. Windows 10 takes just a few seconds (fast boot disabled because of dual boot), whereas Linux Mint takes around 20 seconds. Maybe it's because I have many USB devices attached. It doesn't matter but shutdown matters a lot on dual boot systems, and unfortunately Linux Mint sometimes takes minutes to restart. I believe it's related to systemd and it's very annoying (sometimes I need to switch quickly because I take Zoom calls on Windows).
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    What machine? I've got a 16GB i7 SurfacePro, seems to take minutes compared to other computers I use. Windows updates still take hours and still sometimes need multiple reboots vs Kubuntu which updates whilst in use and barely ever needs rebooting. Having come back to MS Win (for work) after a decade+ away, and with an MS produced computer I was expecting to be blown away by the speed. Aside: have you tried systemd-analyze blamw, very useful for diagnosing boot slowdowns; https://www.commandlinux.com/man-page/man1/systemd-analyze.1.html https://www.commandlinux.com/man-page/man1/systemd-analyze.1...
    - jonathanstrange 6y ago
      It's a 1800x Amd system with 32GB Ram, main partition on SSD, /home on harddisk. Windows updates take minutes, Linux updates are usually even faster (except for upgrades which are much slower than Windows upgrades). I'll try that analyzer. But I don't think the boot is slowed down, it's just a bit slower than Windows. Shutdown takes minutes, though.
- AshamedCaptain 6y ago
  I agree. Even when Windows has "fast startup" enabled, the time from POST to actual desktop in Linux is still better and has improved significantly, and Windows still has that "tends to go slower as you start to install stuff on it". These days I can usually reach Gnome even before my _monitors_ have had time to boot.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    I used to like how KDE could load a session in the background so when you logged in it was ready: for me the post-login takes as long as boot; which makes it annoying. Not as bad as it used to be when the audio tape failed after 20 mins, but still.
moron4hire 6y ago
What kind of janky jalopies are you folks running? It takes my machine all of ten seconds to boot, wait for me to enter my pin, and load the desktop fully.
- brundolf 6y ago
  I commented above but I think it's because they're still on Windows 7. Significant improvements were made in Windows 10
  - notriddle 6y ago
    Corporate spyware. I have two laptops. One I own, with Windows 10, and one from work, also with Windows 10. Both Thinkpads, but not the same model. I own the cheaper one. It’s faster.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  Yeah... I mean, I bag on Windows as much as the next Linux zealot, but my Win10 gaming machine -- still an Athlon64 -- boots from cold start to usable desktop in 5 seconds. It ONLY plays Civ V, but still.
  - pezezin 6y ago
    Honest question, how do you play Civ 5 on an Athlon64? I played a couple of games on my Ryzen 2700X and the end game was unbearably slow, each turn took several minutes.
    - TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
      It runs pretty well on medium settings at 1080p. I have to move the world around a little sometimes to get the tiles to paint. So it’s not great, but turns only take a few seconds. Unfortunately, my $4,000 MBP with a Vega 20 runs it only a little better, so I keep playing it on the PC to save the thermal wear.
- spookthesunset 6y ago
slacktide 6y ago
My work computer is like that. It takes a while to reconnect to all the servers and get the corporate spyware up and running. My Windows 10 PC goes from cold/dark to ready for use in, well, 20 seconds. I keep it lean. My 1982 TI99/4a can go from boot to running a program in about 1.5 seconds, if you can hit “2” as soon as the program selector screen shows. SOLID STATE SOFTWARE
- muxator 6y ago
  You have my upvote for "corporate spyware" :)
ryandrake 6y ago
My Commodore 64 from the early 80s booted near instantly. Maybe 1 or 2 seconds. This was a cold boot from zero--no hibernation or standby. How far we have regressed!
- michrassena 6y ago
  I didn't realize at the time how fortunate I was to have a Tandy 1000HX when I was growing up. It was one of the only PCs I'm aware of which had DOS in ROM. Of course you were stuck with DOS 2.2 or something. But startup times were beyond almost every device I've used since, and certainly miles ahead of any PC. Here's a quick demo from a similar Tandy model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaSkda4XW3k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaSkda4XW3k
  - kiwijamo 6y ago
    Acorn also had RISC OS in ROM. Booted in about two seconds. Yes it was tricky when you had to upgrade but I suspect the constraints made the ROMs better quality. Certainly was rare to come across bugs etc and the performance was miles ahead of the current software we have today.
    - goatgoatgoat 6y ago
      I upgrade the OS for an Acorn A3000 around 30 years ago. It wasn't too bad. Carefully remove the old ROMs from their sockets and carefully push the new ROMs into the now empty sockets. Quickest OS upgrade I've ever done.
    - RantyDave 6y ago
      Fun fact! Risc OS is some quasi open source these days - ie you can see the source. It's in ARM assembler.
  - stonogo 6y ago
    The IBM PS/1 had MS-DOS 4.01 in ROM. You could install newer versions on the hard drive, but I remember being bitterly disappointed on installing the 2.5MB RAM expansion, because the memory test slowed the boot process down tremendously.
raydev 6y ago
Sounds like you're still running a spinning hard drive? I have two PCs, one with a 2.5" SSD and another with an m.2, both are ready to use with 10-15 seconds of cold boot. But cold boot usually isn't necessary, since they sleep just fine.
- spockz 6y ago
  I’m not sure it is necessarily the drives. My hexacore desktop spends more time in POST (or how it is called these days in uefi) than in windows boot. It takes 3s from loading the boot partition to when I can enter my password and about 20-30s before it actually decides to boot the windows EFI rom.
avereveard 6y ago
What annoys me isn't boot time per se, but the sluggines that permains after login as the services-not-services start up and one after another try to steal bandwidth from a WiFi that isn't yet connected. If I could wait whatever time and then log into a usable system it'd be fine, but no, it's a minute after login before I'm in control of local resources

jacquesm 6y ago

My old BBC Micro would go from 'on' to 'prompt' in under the time it would take my hand to move to the keyboard. But then again it had a lot less in terms of hardware to deal with, memory to test and so on.

gorgoiler 6y ago
In fact the BBC Micro would “boot” in the time it takes to play two musical notes, one octave and a tone apart (double-length-B, short-C, geddit?!) To be fair to PCs the DFS prompt was more like a boot-loader than an OS.
- jlarcombe 6y ago
  Hah I never noticed that those were those notes! I believe that's just a remarkable coincidence because the first, lower note is just the result of the SN76489 sound chip being powered up but "uninitialised", as it were. In theory different chips would give different tones but in practice all the ones they used seemed to give a consistent result.

wvenable 6y ago

> which takes upward of 40 sec to get to the desktop. My ancient Core i5 with a whopping 4 cores gets to the Windows 10 desktop in just a few seconds. The truth is that people care much more about features than performance -- especially system/app start up performance. Microsoft has always bet on Moore's law -- building software just not quite usable on modern hardware knowing that eventually hardware will catch up. Anyone designing software for today is immediately behind tomorrow.

baud147258 6y ago

weird, I got a much smaller workstation (like dual core and 10 Gb of RAM) and I get to the desktop in ~ 10 seconds. Maybe Windows is spinning up each core one after the other?

Macha 6y ago
It's less likely to be the amount of cores but rather the amount of RAM actually.

rkagerer 6y ago

My first computer was a TRS-80 and it booted faster than any computer I've owned since.

astrange 6y ago

In my experience as a performance engineer, slow performance in things like boot isn't because of "bloat", it's just because of random bugs that may or may not correlate to having added more features. There is a tradeoff in development time between features and bug fixing of course.

Macha 6y ago

I had that for a while on my Arch Linux install. Then I set up full disk encryption. So now of my 45s boot, 20s is me typing the password, 20s is running the luks kdf, and 5s is the entire rest of the boot process.

CardenB 6y ago

I think mainly we have shifted to just never turning off computers and optimizing for standby.

darren_ 6y ago

Counterpoint: Boot time is basically irrelevant once you have a reliable sleep/hibernate/whatever mode. My PC only reboots for windows updates or if I'm troubleshooting some inexplicable behaviour. For the actual practical use case of sitting down at the computer and starting to use it, my PC wakes up essentially instantly. I simply don't care about boot time. My 2021 experience is far, far better than my 1998 one (well, the computer bits at least).

ergot_vacation 6y ago
Mostly agree. I will concede boot time is a bit slow on 10 for me, but still faster than 95 was, and yes, it doesn't matter much because of the incredible uptime. 95 would often crash multiple times PER DAY. Meanwhile I just had my Win 10 system do an honest to goodness hard blackscreen crash a few days ago, and it was probably the first in months. For what it's worth, I'm sure you could get the "boot" of a Win 10 machine down to almost nothing if you really wanted to. Mostly it's just not worth it.
kiwijamo 6y ago
I remember when even a cold start would drop me into a working desktop within a few seconds. Thus was in the early 90's with RISC OS running on the early days of ARM chips. Respectfully I would argue hibernation and suspend are just a band-aid for the sorry state of hardware and software today. What if we didn't need hibernation or suspend?
- wazoox 6y ago
  My Pop_OS laptop cold boots from button press to login in 8s.
  - arendtio 6y ago
    How much time of these 8s is spend in EFI? When I look at my PC it is so painful to see, that it actually spends more time with EFI than with the OS: $ systemd-analyze Startup finished in 7.859s (firmware) + 1.203s (loader) + 1.683s (kernel) + 1.356s (initrd) + 1.431s (userspace) = 13.534s

winrid 6y ago

If you're using Win7, it's not taking full advantage of your SSD to boot fast. Win8/10 will boot much faster.

convery 6y ago
I have used Win10 as well, about the same boot time.
- nikau 6y ago
  Not sure what you are doing, my win 10 box boots to desktop in around 10 seconds if that
  - omegabravo 6y ago
    My personal Window 10 box boots within 10 seconds. My corporate laptop takes an eternity despite being more powerful. I suspect configuration (software and hardware) has a massive impact which is being glossed over.
    - nikau 6y ago
      Well yes, corporate machines are a different issue. I have a corporate mac that's sluggish due to mcafee chewing 100% CPU for 5 minute intervals, anything with "enterprise" management software on it is going to suck regardless of OS.
      - hyperman1 6y ago
        Just wait until you see windows 10 on a 2GB machine with mcafee, and then corona forces ms teams on it. Boot takes 15 minutes to usable. Usable means msword produces a character on the screen in less than 10 seconds after you type it. IT closed the users ticket without action: As long as it boots in 15 minutes or less, there is no performance problem.
      - lanstin 6y ago

brundolf 6y ago

I was trying to figure out why your experience is so much different from mine until I noticed you said "Win7" You should try Windows 10. They made dramatic improvements to the boot time and my (significantly less beefy) desktop cold-boots in <10s.

chemmail 6y ago
Some optimized laptops are pretty insane. I just got an Asus G14 with a Ryzen 4900HS, the UEFI boot is animated and has a slicing sound and gets into desktop in maybe 5 seconds. I think I can even change the boot animation with the "ROG" button and can make the lid lights dance around unlike the lame Apple logo.
- rubatuga 6y ago
  windows 10 actually does "fast startup" which is kind of like hibernation, similar to hybrid sleep introduced in the past.
lou1306 6y ago
They did, but they had to turn "shutdown" into some kind of "hibernate on steroid". Doing a clean boots takes a bit longer. And we're talking modern, SSD-equipped machines vs. old laptops with spinning disks.
- brundolf 6y ago
  Shutdown, Hibernate, and Sleep are three different things. I'm talking about a proper shutdown; I almost never even bother with Hibernate because a regular cold boot is fast enough
  - nullify88 6y ago
    I don't think you understand the comment parent made. Windows 10 comes with a feature called Fast Boot and it is usually enabled by default depending on RAM, driver support etc. What used to be a "proper shutdown" is now a hybrid hybernate. Parts of the OS in particular related to bootup are stored in a hybernation file which is loaded at boot time resulting in faster boots. This is because Windows can now skip driver init and load state from previous boots.

chubot 6y ago

A similar thing that really opened my eyes: running Windows XP in VirtualBox on a $999 Macbook Air from 2016. It really flies!!! It's fast to boot up and fast to use. It's more usable than the host OS !!! It even recognizes some USB devices quite well and has drivers. In 2021, the host OS of my Macbook Air has somehow rotted, even though I installed like 4 programs on it ever, and I barely use it (I use Linux for almost all tasks). Everything is slow, with both jank and "intended" animations. On the other hand, virtualized Windows XP is extremely responsive. It also runs in a tiny amount of RAM -- I think I can set the VirtualBox VM to 256 MB RAM or something (don't quote me on that) This Macbook Air has 8 GB of RAM and it's slow. I think when I got it in 2016, it was decently fast. Somehow in 2021 all the updates made it slow to a crawl. As always iTunes is a big offender. Somehow playing MP3s has to be a chore. I think Spotlight is another offender and that's something that Windows XP didn't have. I use Ubuntu for my Linux desktop, and it has similar problems. There's lag everywhere and it uses a ton of RAM. It's not more usable from a UI perspective. I see a lot of "lateral" progress, although to be fair Ubuntu from 10-15 years ago was pretty bad (definitely less usable than Windows), and they have made progress.

slavik81 6y ago

That does amaze me. I remember booting taking ages on my 166MHz Windows 98 machine. I'd press the power button and go do something else while it booted.

Tenoke 6y ago
What used to get me was that I'd have to reboot on nearly every install/update/significant change to my PC, thus waiting hours total on just booting every month.
- spookthesunset 6y ago
  Not to mention just maintenance reboots because eventually the computer would just get nutty if you didn’t periodically reboot it. Some time around windows 2000 or perhaps even Vista was when you finally could run the OS for weeks without rebooting.
TheHypnotist 6y ago
Seriously. From powered off to being on the internet (56k) it was like 5 minutes. Now with my SSD and modern broadband it's about 5 seconds.
- AshamedCaptain 6y ago
  It is incredible how much people's "perceptions" are altered after a mere 20 years.

ABS 6y ago

I found my old 1999 T20 last year and it took around 30 seconds to boot into Win95. I've got a video: https://twitter.com/capotribu/status/1262021068690259968 https://twitter.com/capotribu/status/1262021068690259968 Pentium III 547 Mhz, 256 MB RAM, 12GB disk Sadly don't remember if this video is from cold start or from hibernation

rubatuga 6y ago
definitely hibernation
- ABS 6y ago
  I think so considering the message on screen
jonathanlydall 6y ago
That looks like Windows XP based on the desktop icons and I'm quite sure that Windows 95 didn't support hibernation, it only arrived with Windows 2000 if I recall correctly. Windows XP only came out in 2001, so if the laptop was from 1999 then it must have been upgraded to Windows XP at some point. That text based progress bar shows exclusively for resume from hibernate, hence rubatuga saying it's "definitely hibernation".
- ABS 6y ago
  indeed it looks like I posted the wrong one!
- Narishma 6y ago
  I think it's Windows 2000. Unless Windows XP has that same text mode loading screen, which I don't remember.
  - AshamedCaptain 6y ago
    That is XP. Seriously, just look at the icons.... And yes, XP has exactly the same boot screen. It just goes significantly faster than on 2k, which means most of the time you didn't get to see it.

AshamedCaptain 6y ago

There is NO WAY an HDD laptop boots Windows 98 in 10 seconds. Even booting Windows 98 in a VM on a 1yr old processor backed by _friggin RAM_ takes slightly more than that. Windows 98 used to take 1-3 minutes to boot on that level of hardware. And if you had any type of network, it was probably even more than 3 minutes. There is a reason hibernation (even at the BIOS level) was all the rage these days. For better or worse, MS did something on Windows during the XP era that finally made it be able to boot fast (on modern hardware at least). Win2K still has insanely long "delays".

madpata 6y ago
Maybe has something to do with cached driver configuration, but I don't know which version of Windows introduced it. It has to do with remembering which drivers were loaded the last time the OS ran and loading those first on reboot. Saves time on checking the whole driver catalog.
- AshamedCaptain 6y ago
  I remember at the time some propaganda about XP doing "concurrent initialization" for some drivers. My impression is they just fine-tuned some of the IO delay loops (or equivalent). Most of the Win2k boottime is spent with no CPU or disk usage. XP is way more efficient at that.

albertzeyer 6y ago

Well, my current workstation boots in about 5 seconds, and it is not so special (NVM SSD, Linux/Ubuntu). Maybe you misconfigured sth? I remember that I once had something bad in my systemd services, which caused a long hang waiting for nothing and then failing after 1 min timeout. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1234713/why-slow-startup-boot-process-and-how-to-fix https://askubuntu.com/questions/1234713/why-slow-startup-boo...

distances 6y ago
Cold boot? My computer doesn't show even the first BIOS screen in first five seconds.
- qorrect 6y ago
  Same, and Im running AMD Threadripper 3970x, 32gigs of RAM and an nVME. It takes almost 60 seconds to load.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    Hmm, that sounds quite a lot longer than I'm used to these days. I just checked, and I'm 17s from cold boot to Windows 10 login prompt on my Ryzen 2600 desktop with NVMe boot drive. I also checked on one of my 5 year-old HP Zbook G3 (Xeon E3, 64GB RAM, NVMe boot drive), and it was 23s - and that's a corporate machine, loaded with crap.
- albertzeyer 6y ago
  Yes, cold boot. There were some options in the BIOS (or EFI? I forgot) to skip some things, and to reduce this wait time for the BIOS hotkey.
shortlived 6y ago
SSD + Xubuntu + refurbished Dell optiplex FTW!