News: Microsoft Targets 15-second Boot for Windows 7

[Mike]

Many bloggers and tech pundits have criticized Windows Vista for being too sluggish. With Windows 7, Microsoft seems to be working hard to make a leaner and speedier operating system—starting with boot times.

Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Michael Fortin has written a piece on the official "Engineering Windows 7" blog to discuss startup times in particular. According to Fortin, Microsoft has set aside a team to work solely on the issue, and that team aims to "significantly increase the number of systems that experience very good boot times." Vague? Not really. Fortin defines a "very good boot time" as being less than 15 seconds, and he says only 35% of Vista Service Pack 1 systems today boot in 30 seconds or less. (That number comes from anonymous data gathered through the Customer Experience Improvement Program.)

The startup team has a number of tricks up its sleeve to make things better. Among those, the team has "focused very hard on increasing parallelism of driver initialization." Also, it aims to "dramatically reduce" the number of system services—along with their processor, storage, and memory demands. Fortin specifies, "Our perspective on this is simple; if a service is not absolutely required, it shouldn't be starting and a trigger should exist to handle rare conditions so that the service operates only then."

Windows 7 may not come out until at least 2010, though, so Microsoft has released a little something to tide over partners and enthusiasts. Available from the MSDN library, the Windows Performance Toolkit includes "tools [the boot-up team] use internally to detect and correct boot issues." Check out Fortin's full blog post for more details about both the toolkit and the startup team's efforts.

source: www.techreport.com

[ExtremePC]

Originally Posted by Mike

Many bloggers and tech pundits have criticized Windows Vista for being too sluggish. With Windows 7, Microsoft seems to be working hard to make a leaner and speedier operating system—starting with boot times.

Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Michael Fortin has written a piece on the official "Engineering Windows 7" blog to discuss startup times in particular. According to Fortin, Microsoft has set aside a team to work solely on the issue, and that team aims to "significantly increase the number of systems that experience very good boot times." Vague? Not really. Fortin defines a "very good boot time" as being less than 15 seconds, and he says only 35% of Vista Service Pack 1 systems today boot in 30 seconds or less. (That number comes from anonymous data gathered through the Customer Experience Improvement Program.)

The startup team has a number of tricks up its sleeve to make things better. Among those, the team has "focused very hard on increasing parallelism of driver initialization." Also, it aims to "dramatically reduce" the number of system services—along with their processor, storage, and memory demands. Fortin specifies, "Our perspective on this is simple; if a service is not absolutely required, it shouldn't be starting and a trigger should exist to handle rare conditions so that the service operates only then."

Windows 7 may not come out until at least 2010, though, so Microsoft has released a little something to tide over partners and enthusiasts. Available from the MSDN library, the Windows Performance Toolkit includes "tools [the boot-up team] use internally to detect and correct boot issues." Check out Fortin's full blog post for more details about both the toolkit and the startup team's efforts.

source: www.techreport.com

So in a nutshell MS are only now putting into place what tech savy users have already been doing for the last 10 years when we optimise what gets loaded during Windows boot/startup. So which customer feedback are they responding to ... windows 95?

[vlad]

Another 15 seconds multiplied by 1000 will be taken from my life by MS
Better than before, so I will reboot more often.

[arkay]

Yeah. Like boot time matters to anyone who doesn't have to reboot constantly.

According to Fortin, Microsoft has set aside a team to work solely on the issue

Wow.. A whole team! Hope it's not the ehome team!

Ah... I needed a good belly laugh.

Thanks MS.

Wonder if they be encouraging bios manufacturers to get rid of hardware detection so we can shave 30 sec+ of the boot cycle. Hardly anything a bios does is relevant to a modern OS. Most of it is there for DOS compatibility.

BTW. Mike. Can we archive all these MS promises in a single thread so we can show just how much of what they promise gets delivered.

I'd rather believe K Rudds election promises!

I bet the best they do is get the desktop up even faster (gets the tick in the fast boot box), meanwhile the machine is unresponsive for the next 5 minutes as all those parallel processes fight for poorly handled resource allocations.

Of course. You can get asus splashtop motherboards now that are ready for basic use (email, web etc) in under 5 seconds. Pretty sure a <15 sec boot should be something impressive by 2010...

Cheers,

Arkay.

[ExtremePC]

Originally Posted by arkay

Of course. You can get asus splashtop motherboards now that are ready for basic use (email, web etc) in under 5 seconds.

I've got one in the form of the ASUS P5Q-E and 5 seconds into a browser or email is about right.

[carll]

how about they fix all the lil memory leakages issues (ie powerpoint) so we wouldn't have to reboot at all

than it really wouldn't matter if it did take 5 mim to boot if you didn't have to reboot for the rest of the month that would be nice

[dgaust]

How about building an OS that you don't have to reboot any time you change/update a minor function. If they do that, I couldn't care less how long it takes to start up.

[zers69]

In my opinion, they should better keep concentrated on improving the sleeping issues. Because up to now, this is more useful to reboot the system rather than use the S3 sleep feature.

M$ has to provide manufacturers with simple and detailed specifications so that manufacturers could build better hardware and much compliant drivers with the OS...

Unless they don't care about futurs Media center users...

regards

[ExtremePC]

I'd rather see it the other way, manufacturers come to an agreed apon standard (EFI anyone) and MS conform to it. And while were at it how about MS release NTFS as an open standard for cross platform compatibility.

[arkay]

Originally Posted by zers69

M$ has to provide manufacturers with simple and detailed specifications so that manufacturers could build better hardware and much compliant drivers with the OS...

Shouldn't the hardware manufacturers agree on a standard and specification, publish it and then software people can implement working sleep functionality?

Since when do the software people tell the hardware people how to design their hardware? Rediculous! Even hardware vendors can't innovate for fear of not being "software compatible".

Software is the malleable part of the equation.

Cheers,

Arkay.