Instant Windows

Posted on October 16, 2008

Dumb question if I asked you if you feel that Windows is too slow in starting up.

You certainly can’t think so as much as I do. There’s just so much coffee I can drink waiting on the completion of the startup. Granted it’s not all just Windows related, there are a lot of other processes that have to complete on mine — things like Tivo Desktop and Cyberlink’s TV Enhance, along with the resident spyware and antivirus softwares, etc. etc.

I mean mine can wipe out 4-5 minutes of time trying to finish loading everything. It’s real frustrating, but I just don’t want to wipe out and restore/reinstall everything.

Well, interestingly, Microsoft is surveying select users on whether an “instant on” feature, which would bring a usable desktop to your screen in just seconds, is something they’d like included with Windows.

The concept they’re discussing would bring Windows from dead off to the point where a certain number of activities could be accessed in a matter of seconds. That’s an idea that many would relish, though if the CPU availability for those activities is like mine is on start up, it wouldn’t be very useful. A certain level of booting has completed when I get desktop icons and many is the time I’ve tried to do something basic like open My Computer only to have the operation grind to a halt because something else has started loading in the background and taken over the CPU.

A ‘fool’s boot’ was incorporated into XP to convince the user that everything was accessible because the icons were there. Truth be known, I found out when trying to load Outlook from the Startup group on boot that it mostly errored out when trying to access Exchange server in our corporate domain because, pretty pictures aside, it wasn’t through loading all the network components. So a quick desktop didn’t signal a completed boot process.

This instant on version would probably wind up the same way. Yes, you could do some things, if you remembered not to try others, bringing the start up sequence to a grinding halt.

Faster boot times are clearly a priority for Microsoft and could be included to some degree in Windows 7, the next planned release of the operating system. Microsoft has stated that they believe a system booted to some usable state in around 15 seconds would be a measure of success.

No arguments here.