3 ms·
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
by 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 agoMaybe 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 agoI 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.