28 Minutes to boot? That's roughly what will be the norm in another decade ;)
It's insane how much faster CPUs have become and how slow an average machine boots to full functionality. The days of 'instant on, instant off' are long behind us.
The amount of persistence behind these projects never fails to amaze me, see also the guy that made a miniature version of the Cray-1:
I threw a solid state drive in my turbo XT and load times even for MS-DOS 3 aren’t good. Loading up Windows 3 is terrible. WordStar can boot okay if you’re not using any TSRs to enhance functionality. You want to load Civilization? There’s a wait.
If we move on to Win98 or 2K on say a Pentium3, with a solid state disk everything becomes somewhat snappy. The SSD is the main gain. Take it away and everything is abysmal.
I love ancient hardware, but if you go back to relive using those machines… it just ain’t what we remember. Our expectations have changed.
The 8bit cartridge based computers really are instant on. I think that may be what the op is referring to. I don’t think any system with a hard drive or sdram can even get to a boot loader in the same amount of time regardless of the latency of the boot medium. It really was a different era.
They also only loaded BASIC instantly. Want to load from tape or floppy and you’re back to waiting. Same thing if you run your BASIC program. Instant on in that case was restricted to the ROM BASIC and cartridges.
> It's insane how much faster CPUs have become and how slow an average machine boots to full functionality. The days of 'instant on, instant off' are long behind us.
Both my Mac and custom built PC boot very quickly. Faster than my PCs in the past. I'm not even doing anything special, just grabbing a generic motherboard, NVMe drive, and installing Windows.
Powering off is a rare event, though. Sleep functionality has been rock solid in both OS X and Windows 10 for me in recent times.
> Both my Mac and custom built PC boot very quickly.
It would be interesting to quantify this across many machines / OSs. Say from cold boot to starting a browser and loading a benchmark webpage (to ensure the network is up and running).
My girlfriend's windows 10 on spinning disks take much less than that for the desktop to appear, but I don't think her desktop is really usable until way beyond 25 minutes.
My professional laptop on windows 10 boot in a few seconds but then it takes a minute or 2 for Microsoft Teams to show up and that is with SSDs. In comparison same laptop on linux take a little more time to boot to desktop but I can quickly get a browser window with teams / outlook and open other apps so while it appears slower to boot it is usable roughly at the same time. There are a lot of shitty technics to make windows appear loading faster than it really does.
What matters is not the time for the login screen or desktop to appear but the time until you can be productive on it.
I guess you are joking, but that's could be really something that was thought by someone in marketing. Such as the switch from making ads about technical features of software (~1980') to ads displaying boxes (~1990).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I think you could probably just clone the HDD to an SSD using a Linux live CD and "pv" or whatever and have no issues. I've done that for Windows installs in the past with very little trouble. Only issue I had was expanding the partition on the new drive with the recovery partition in the way.
Yes, I see that as one possible avenue. The possible issue with that approach is that the SSD is able to interrupt the OS at a much higher rate than an SSD, which may well increase the throughput of the system as a whole but cause latency issues substantial enough to cause drop outs.
These cards run with very small output buffers to reduce their latency and any kind of delay will deplete the buffer resulting in a buffer underrun condition and that manifests as a drop-out in the audio stream.
Another alternative is to get rid of the whole kaboodle and do it all in software, that's definitely a possibility with present day gear but I'm kind of partial to this old rig, it sounds great and is very comfortable to work with, much nicer than any pure software solution that I've seen so far.
> Yes, I see that as one possible avenue. The possible issue with that approach is that the SSD is able to interrupt the OS at a much higher rate than an SSD, which may well increase the throughput of the system as a whole but cause latency issues substantial enough to cause drop outs.
If this is a thing, you are already in burn-it-down territory with your hardware.
I've been doing audio for a pretty long time, and I struggle to conceive of a system so marginally-fit-for-purpose-but-still-extant where drive interrupts will threaten audio timings.
Indeed, it is pretty dicey the way it is set up. The machine that came with the deck had the software installed, a broken firewire card, no installation media. Getting it to work was incredibly tedious and I don't doubt that it is a very fine line between success and failure but work it does, no registered drop outs across many, many hours of working with all audio channels live.
If it wasn't for the firewire requirement this would be a very easy problem to solve. I don't understand why that standard is now so blacklisted that it isn't even supported any more by more modern incarnations of windows.
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.
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.
I don’t boot anymore. Haven’t for years. I just lift the lid and there it is. But I do remember when it felt like 28 mins.
I think “booting” might become a concept that goes the way of “download.” That is, it will eventually be unknowable to those who didn’t grow up with it. Computers are just on, and files are just accessed.
Funny enough - reboots are becoming a thing with Windows 10/11. I really dislike the way my Windows box now patches and reboots when it feels like it. Without fail, I'll have wherever I had my workflow paused for the night... just wrecked. It was so close to right with Windows 7.
I don't mind reboots, since I sleep at least once a day. The main issue is the inability to restore state. MacOS has reopened everything I had open before a reboot for years now and I'm not sure why Windows still struggles with this.
Are you running some kind of an OS that doesn't need reboots for any of its updates? Are you using some kind of live patching?
I (somewhat) rarely do a full reboot either, and Linux on my laptop may go for a couple of months without a reboot, but I don't really trust that updates to the desktop environment or even lower-level libraries or things like systemd would be in effect without restarting most or all of the system. (Not to mention the kernel, of course, but kernel vulnerabilities that are easily exploitable remotely would probably create a ruckus.)
I guess you could also just trust that there aren't remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in those components, but I honestly don't have the energy to keep track.
By that point rebooting occasionally just becomes simpler.
That's an interesting viewpoint, yes, you are probably right. But 'download' is still a thing even if streaming services are more and more common. And with the frequency of OS updates booting is also still a thing unless you never patch your systems.
Machines these days boot and become usable faster than anything I remember, and I've been using computers for 40 years. Yeah, maybe an IBM PC booting DOS 1 or 2 booted faster, but I don't recall, and didn't use either version very long.
I picked up a mini pc for my son a few weeks ago. €439 for a Ryzen 5600H, 32GB DDR4 RAM and a 500GB NVMe SSD. It comes with Windows 11 Pro and boots in ~10 seconds.
Fedora runs great on it as well, booting in around 15 seconds, with the exception of suspend making the system unstable but that isn't uncommon with Linux sadly.
For the price and form factor these mini pc are great. I just hope it lasts more than a few months :D
My current Linux laptop (System76 darter pro 8, Ubuntu jammy, 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1240P, UEFI firmware) boots to a login screen pretty snappily, less than a minute, and from there it's up to me how quickly I type my password. I get a usable system very shortly thereafter because Window Maker is pretty lean. Getting a system back from a suspend-to-disk is pretty instantaneous.
It's insane how much faster CPUs have become and how slow an average machine boots to full functionality. The days of 'instant on, instant off' are long behind us.
The amount of persistence behind these projects never fails to amaze me, see also the guy that made a miniature version of the Cray-1:
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191877-how-to-build-your...