4 ms·

Windows 8 boots faster because Windows 8 lies to you when you "Shutdown." Windows 8 actually hibernates instead of shutting down for real; and you can get the s

Windows 8 boots faster because Windows 8 lies to you when you "Shutdown." Windows 8 actually hibernates instead of shutting down for real; and you can get the same effect by enabling hibernation on Windows 7 (or disabling "Fast startup" on Windows 8). I'm also very surprised it took 20 second to boot in Windows 7 with an SSD. I have an SSD (an M4 specifically, on a SATA-3 connection) and Windows 7 never took 20 seconds to boot (with a UEFI "bios"). Closer to 10~12 seconds I would say. I've been running 8 now for weeks and my biggest complaints are, firstly that they removed tons of "desktop" software (e.g. Picture Viewer, Media Player, the Games, et al) and secondly that they removed DVD playback (and even if you purchase it, it still only works in Media Centre). Metro is something you can ignore. I will say that most Metro apps like the built-in Mail app are just horribly bad. So bad in fact that they're beyond use in some cases. Hopefully third parties can do useful things with Metro, because right now it doesn't have many use-cases.

cabirum 14y ago
Photo viewer and Media Player are there. When you first open a picture or a video, Windows asks what app to use - Metro or desktop one. It can be changed later in Program Defaults.
s_henry_paulson 14y ago
Regarding your biggest complaint, they did not remove "tons" of desktop software. In fact, all of the software that you mention all exists in Windows 8. If you want to use Windows Photo Viewer or Windows Media player, just right click whatever you are trying to view, and set your default program.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
josteink 14y ago
Windows 8 boots faster because Windows 8 lies to you when you "Shutdown." Windows 8 actually hibernates instead of shutting down for real; and you can get the same effect by enabling hibernation on Windows 7 Incorrect. This is provenly false. Windows 8 boots faster from a cold boot than Windows 7. It really does. The memory footprint is much smaller. The runtime environment is much more optimized and snappy. You can tell Microsoft has cut out lots of cruft and optimized critical code-paths, especially with regard to boot. Hibernation which you refer to is a different feature, and provides you with the same session and programs and state as you had running before, just like a normal sleep would do on a laptop, except it will survive a flat battery. It does so by persisting your entire RAM to disk for reloading on boot. This is completely different from booting which would give you a new, empty session. So if you end up with an empty session, it's provenly not hibernating, it's booting. And boot is much, much faster. On all system's I've had, hibarnation, designed to save time, has only caused increased latency for shutdown/sleeping/hibernation, and similar increase in boot times since not only Windows needs to load, but all that persisted state must be restored as well. On machines with more than 4GBs of RAM this leads to horrible performance and I've permanently disabled the option for the OS to use this due to the performance issues involved. On Windows 8 I've kept the defaults and things are just flying.
- davedx 14y ago
  "This is provenly false" Citation needed.
  - josteink 14y ago
    OP claims that a Windows 8 uses a feature which without exception causes 1. extra IO workload, 2. reduced performance and which 3. persists entire sessions to 1. reduce IO workload, 2. increase performance while at the same time 3. session is not persisted. I point out how this argument makes no sense. I don't think I'm the one you should target with "citation needed".
    - jasomill 14y ago
      Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk. If you’re not familiar with hibernation, we’re effectively saving the system state and memory contents to a file on disk (hiberfil.sys) and then reading that back in on resume and restoring contents back to memory. Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested). Source: Microsoft, "Delivering fast boot times in Windows 8", Building Windows 8 blog, September 9, 2011 [1] [1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/08/delivering-fast-boot-times-in-windows-8.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/08/delivering-fas...
      - josteink 14y ago
        That's certainly interesting, and thanks for proving parts of my argument wrong. I do appreciate being corrected. However OP made the following claim: Windows 8 lies to you when you "Shutdown." Windows 8 actually hibernates instead of shutting down for real; and you can get the same effect by enabling hibernation on Windows 7 Note the part that where he claims that you can get the same speedup on Windows 7 by enabling hibernation. This is provenly false and anyone who has tried it would know.
mtgx 14y ago
I wonder if Windows 8 will include some behavior research by default, to see if people actually use Metro or not, and if too many ignore it, maybe change course with Windows 9.
owenw 14y ago
You are correct, sir, but if you press "restart" you forgo the "fast boot" hybrid and you do a cold boot. This is talked about in the article I reference on MSDN. P.S - Picture viewer, Media Player, etc are still there, just not default. It's a pain.

Windows 8 boots faster because Windows 8 lies to you when you "Shutdown." Windows 8 actually hibernates instead of shutting down for real; and you can get the same effect by enabling hibernation on Windows 7 (or disabling "Fast startup" on Windows 8). I'm also very surprised it took 20 second to boot in Windows 7 with an SSD. I have an SSD (an M4 specifically, on a SATA-3 connection) and Windows 7 never took 20 seconds to boot (with a UEFI "bios"). Closer to 10~12 seconds I would say. I've been running 8 now for weeks and my biggest complaints are, firstly that they removed tons of "desktop" software (e.g. Picture Viewer, Media Player, the Games, et al) and secondly that they removed DVD playback (and even if you purchase it, it still only works in Media Centre). Metro is something you can ignore. I will say that most Metro apps like the built-in Mail app are just horribly bad. So bad in fact that they're beyond use in some cases. Hopefully third parties can do useful things with Metro, because right now it doesn't have many use-cases.

cabirum 14y ago

Photo viewer and Media Player are there. When you first open a picture or a video, Windows asks what app to use - Metro or desktop one. It can be changed later in Program Defaults.

s_henry_paulson 14y ago

Regarding your biggest complaint, they did not remove "tons" of desktop software. In fact, all of the software that you mention all exists in Windows 8. If you want to use Windows Photo Viewer or Windows Media player, just right click whatever you are trying to view, and set your default program.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

josteink 14y ago

Windows 8 boots faster because Windows 8 lies to you when you "Shutdown." Windows 8 actually hibernates instead of shutting down for real; and you can get the same effect by enabling hibernation on Windows 7 Incorrect. This is provenly false. Windows 8 boots faster from a cold boot than Windows 7. It really does. The memory footprint is much smaller. The runtime environment is much more optimized and snappy. You can tell Microsoft has cut out lots of cruft and optimized critical code-paths, especially with regard to boot. Hibernation which you refer to is a different feature, and provides you with the same session and programs and state as you had running before, just like a normal sleep would do on a laptop, except it will survive a flat battery. It does so by persisting your entire RAM to disk for reloading on boot. This is completely different from booting which would give you a new, empty session. So if you end up with an empty session, it's provenly not hibernating, it's booting. And boot is much, much faster. On all system's I've had, hibarnation, designed to save time, has only caused increased latency for shutdown/sleeping/hibernation, and similar increase in boot times since not only Windows needs to load, but all that persisted state must be restored as well. On machines with more than 4GBs of RAM this leads to horrible performance and I've permanently disabled the option for the OS to use this due to the performance issues involved. On Windows 8 I've kept the defaults and things are just flying.

davedx 14y ago
"This is provenly false" Citation needed.
- josteink 14y ago
  OP claims that a Windows 8 uses a feature which without exception causes 1. extra IO workload, 2. reduced performance and which 3. persists entire sessions to 1. reduce IO workload, 2. increase performance while at the same time 3. session is not persisted. I point out how this argument makes no sense. I don't think I'm the one you should target with "citation needed".
  - jasomill 14y ago
    Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk. If you’re not familiar with hibernation, we’re effectively saving the system state and memory contents to a file on disk (hiberfil.sys) and then reading that back in on resume and restoring contents back to memory. Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested). Source: Microsoft, "Delivering fast boot times in Windows 8", Building Windows 8 blog, September 9, 2011 [1] [1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/08/delivering-fast-boot-times-in-windows-8.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/08/delivering-fas...
    - josteink 14y ago
      That's certainly interesting, and thanks for proving parts of my argument wrong. I do appreciate being corrected. However OP made the following claim: Windows 8 lies to you when you "Shutdown." Windows 8 actually hibernates instead of shutting down for real; and you can get the same effect by enabling hibernation on Windows 7 Note the part that where he claims that you can get the same speedup on Windows 7 by enabling hibernation. This is provenly false and anyone who has tried it would know.

mtgx 14y ago

I wonder if Windows 8 will include some behavior research by default, to see if people actually use Metro or not, and if too many ignore it, maybe change course with Windows 9.

owenw 14y ago

You are correct, sir, but if you press "restart" you forgo the "fast boot" hybrid and you do a cold boot. This is talked about in the article I reference on MSDN. P.S - Picture viewer, Media Player, etc are still there, just not default. It's a pain.