5 ms·

What computer are you using that boots so slowly? I can’t say I have had that issue in over a decade.

jacquesm 4y ago
I have exactly one windows box in this house and I avoid turning it on but it is a requirement to operate a particular piece of hardware. It takes several minutes before it has completely booted, it runs Windows 7 on what is a perfectly fine machine for that OS. Highly frustrating. That's why you get articles like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831931 And many others besides. Windows can be such a cycle hog. Probably if I installed 64G of RAM and an SSD I could cut it down to something more decent, but I don't use that machine often enough to offset the expense (and never mind driver/installation media hassles, it isn't broken so don't fix it!). Other machines take on average about a minute or so but they are running Linux, running Windows on them would easily double that. My daily driver is a T540p (mostly to conserve power) and it works well enough. Not exactly a speed daemon in use but maxed out on RAM (16G), a 2.5 GHz i7 and a fast SSD it doesn't perform nearly as well as my 20 year old self would have expected it to. OS and browser will happily eat all of that, and I can't use swap because of the audio drop-outs that would cause. If there was a way to shoehorn in more memory I would take it.
- dontlaugh 4y ago
  You need an SSD. My Windows 10 machine boots in 10 seconds at most.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > It takes several minutes before it has completely booted, it runs Windows 7 on what is a perfectly fine machine for that OS. > Probably if I installed 64G of RAM and an SSD... You're complaining about boot times, but using an OS that has been deprecated for years and using a mechanical HDD? SSDs have been the norm for a long, long time. Complaining about boot times of deprecated operating systems on outdated hardware that virtually nobody uses in new builds is very misleading. I hope you can see the irony of complaining about modern boot times by benchmarking things against a completely outdated system.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    That machine shipped with Windows 7 and a mechanical HDD. It has 4G of RAM which should be plenty for the purpose. As for 'new builds', yes, SSDs are faster. But the speed gain from an SSD is negated to some degree by the amount of bloat present in a typical OS and if not for that you shouldn't be able to tell the difference between 'sleep' and 'cold boot', in fact 'cold boot' should be faster (but it really isn't). As for the complaint: take it with a grain of humor. It was mostly a contrast between booting say my 1980's BBC Micro (you couldn't move your hand from the powerswitch faster than that the prompt appeared) to the times that we have come to accept. SSDs have cut that time to something more acceptable but I fully expect that advantage to be eroded again over the years because that's what happens with software: it always becomes larger and slower, never smaller and faster. On identical hardware a newer release of any OS is invariably slower than whatever came before.
    - goosedragons 4y ago
      One of the features of Windows 8 was decreased boot times. I don't think its the only OS to do that either. SSDs make a massive difference even for Windows 7 too.
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        Interesting, if I ever decide to risk the stability of that box I may try an upgrade. To give you an idea of what it does: this box is the interface to my Tascam mix deck and the firewire support is something that you really don't want to mess with if you don't have to . It runs a very large number of audio channels through that firewire interface and even the slightest change to that configuration risks a never ending nightmare of drop-outs and crashes, usually when you really don't need them. With Firewire having been deprecated and this mix deck and the windows machine joined at the hip I take the nuisance for granted and just work my way around it. I was lucky to find a card and driver that worked, I must have tried more than 10 different combinations before I found one that worked reliably. Adding an SSD may well upset that balance and would require a complete re-install anyway and that risks ending up with an unstable or unusable system, so that's why that route is closed, though, maybe if I were to copy the image of the current HD to an SSD I could make it work without upsetting things too much.
- scarface74 4y ago
  I installed Windows 7 on an old 1.66Ghz Core Dúo Mac Mini (circa 2006) with 1.5GB of RAM with a slow 60GB 5200 rpm hard drive and gave it to my mom as a secondary computer. It doesn’t take several minutes to boot. I last played with it about a year ago. That thing won’t die.
- golf1052 4y ago
  I just timed the boot speed for my Windows 11 desktop. Once with a regular shutdown, once with fast startup disabled (which was introduced with Windows 8). 10-12 seconds to get to the login screen (after typing my BitLocker password). 7 seconds to login using face authentication. I do have very modern specs (Ryzen 9 5900X, 32 GB RAM, Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus) but my suspicions are that your boot speed could be dramatically reduced by just upgrading to an SSD. Here's metrics from Tom's Hardware comparing an HDD to two types of SSDs (SATA and NVMe)[1] on a Windows 10 machine. The HDD had a boot time of 42.9 seconds. The SATA SSD a time of 17.2 and the NVMe SSD a time of 16.1 seconds. With the advantage of fast startup the HDD machine was able to boot under a minute but the SATA SSD still cut the boot time of the machine by nearly 2/3rds. 1. https://www.tomshardware.com/features/ssd-vs-hdd-hard-drive-difference/2 https://www.tomshardware.com/features/ssd-vs-hdd-hard-drive-...
mikewarot 4y ago
My windows machines can take anywhere from 5 seconds to 5+ minutes to boot, depending on if it's Wednesday or not.

I have exactly one windows box in this house and I avoid turning it on but it is a requirement to operate a particular piece of hardware. It takes several minutes before it has completely booted, it runs Windows 7 on what is a perfectly fine machine for that OS. Highly frustrating. That's why you get articles like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831931 And many others besides. Windows can be such a cycle hog. Probably if I installed 64G of RAM and an SSD I could cut it down to something more decent, but I don't use that machine often enough to offset the expense (and never mind driver/installation media hassles, it isn't broken so don't fix it!). Other machines take on average about a minute or so but they are running Linux, running Windows on them would easily double that. My daily driver is a T540p (mostly to conserve power) and it works well enough. Not exactly a speed daemon in use but maxed out on RAM (16G), a 2.5 GHz i7 and a fast SSD it doesn't perform nearly as well as my 20 year old self would have expected it to. OS and browser will happily eat all of that, and I can't use swap because of the audio drop-outs that would cause. If there was a way to shoehorn in more memory I would take it.

dontlaugh 4y ago
You need an SSD. My Windows 10 machine boots in 10 seconds at most.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> It takes several minutes before it has completely booted, it runs Windows 7 on what is a perfectly fine machine for that OS. > Probably if I installed 64G of RAM and an SSD... You're complaining about boot times, but using an OS that has been deprecated for years and using a mechanical HDD? SSDs have been the norm for a long, long time. Complaining about boot times of deprecated operating systems on outdated hardware that virtually nobody uses in new builds is very misleading. I hope you can see the irony of complaining about modern boot times by benchmarking things against a completely outdated system.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  That machine shipped with Windows 7 and a mechanical HDD. It has 4G of RAM which should be plenty for the purpose. As for 'new builds', yes, SSDs are faster. But the speed gain from an SSD is negated to some degree by the amount of bloat present in a typical OS and if not for that you shouldn't be able to tell the difference between 'sleep' and 'cold boot', in fact 'cold boot' should be faster (but it really isn't). As for the complaint: take it with a grain of humor. It was mostly a contrast between booting say my 1980's BBC Micro (you couldn't move your hand from the powerswitch faster than that the prompt appeared) to the times that we have come to accept. SSDs have cut that time to something more acceptable but I fully expect that advantage to be eroded again over the years because that's what happens with software: it always becomes larger and slower, never smaller and faster. On identical hardware a newer release of any OS is invariably slower than whatever came before.
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    One of the features of Windows 8 was decreased boot times. I don't think its the only OS to do that either. SSDs make a massive difference even for Windows 7 too.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Interesting, if I ever decide to risk the stability of that box I may try an upgrade. To give you an idea of what it does: this box is the interface to my Tascam mix deck and the firewire support is something that you really don't want to mess with if you don't have to . It runs a very large number of audio channels through that firewire interface and even the slightest change to that configuration risks a never ending nightmare of drop-outs and crashes, usually when you really don't need them. With Firewire having been deprecated and this mix deck and the windows machine joined at the hip I take the nuisance for granted and just work my way around it. I was lucky to find a card and driver that worked, I must have tried more than 10 different combinations before I found one that worked reliably. Adding an SSD may well upset that balance and would require a complete re-install anyway and that risks ending up with an unstable or unusable system, so that's why that route is closed, though, maybe if I were to copy the image of the current HD to an SSD I could make it work without upsetting things too much.
scarface74 4y ago
I installed Windows 7 on an old 1.66Ghz Core Dúo Mac Mini (circa 2006) with 1.5GB of RAM with a slow 60GB 5200 rpm hard drive and gave it to my mom as a secondary computer. It doesn’t take several minutes to boot. I last played with it about a year ago. That thing won’t die.
golf1052 4y ago
I just timed the boot speed for my Windows 11 desktop. Once with a regular shutdown, once with fast startup disabled (which was introduced with Windows 8). 10-12 seconds to get to the login screen (after typing my BitLocker password). 7 seconds to login using face authentication. I do have very modern specs (Ryzen 9 5900X, 32 GB RAM, Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus) but my suspicions are that your boot speed could be dramatically reduced by just upgrading to an SSD. Here's metrics from Tom's Hardware comparing an HDD to two types of SSDs (SATA and NVMe)[1] on a Windows 10 machine. The HDD had a boot time of 42.9 seconds. The SATA SSD a time of 17.2 and the NVMe SSD a time of 16.1 seconds. With the advantage of fast startup the HDD machine was able to boot under a minute but the SATA SSD still cut the boot time of the machine by nearly 2/3rds. 1. https://www.tomshardware.com/features/ssd-vs-hdd-hard-drive-difference/2 https://www.tomshardware.com/features/ssd-vs-hdd-hard-drive-...

mikewarot 4y ago

My windows machines can take anywhere from 5 seconds to 5+ minutes to boot, depending on if it's Wednesday or not.