Zero to Windows Vista in 2 to 3 seconds

Remember back in the day when the Microsoft peeps were showing off Windows XP and its drastically decreased boot and resume startup times? Remember how blown away everyone was when Bill hit a button and your computer sprang back to life from suspend? But then Windows sclerosis sets in, and you're lucky if your machine boots in six minutes or shuts down in two—so Microsoft's taking it back to the old school in Windows Vista, which they're claiming will boot powered off in two to three seconds. Of course, what they mean by "boot" in this case could be pretty much anything (hell, we can't even get past our BIOS in two to three seconds), but if nothing else at least they're setting a tall order for making Vista a little more friendly to work with. While we're on the topic, may we suggest getting rid of the freaking registry?

[Via Gadgetopia]

[Giddieon @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

wow to little to late, I am switching to Linux and Apple... In fact I am running Linux now... I am tried of MS and there krap...

Sorry Bill I should have left you long ago...

[benderillo @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

Im beta testing Longhorn Beta 1 and from personal experience, it boots about 15 seconds slower than my 1 year old install of XP pro. (they are on the same machine)
They have alot of work to do to get to 3 seconds.

[Michael Staff @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

can a computer even run without a registry?

[RElapse @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

1: all things Mac has done for years and has perfected, bill think of something new instaead of borging everyone elses ideas

2: 2-3 second boot up, ill beilieve it when i see it, and correct me if i am wrong but a POST boot up takes longer, more lies from Microshaft

[Winston @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

what's wrong with the registry. why are people always attcking it?

[RElapse @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

and yes a computer can work with out a "registry" so to speak

[john @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

How about reducing the number of times we have to boot? I leave my machines running or asleep at all times. When you only have to reboot once or twice a month, boot times don't eat up lot of time.

[Ed @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

They are talking about having this when we have 16 gig of solid state memory on the hard drive. The drives are due out next year sometime.

So they are not fibbing too much, it just will not boot like that with current technology.

[Kevin @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

"OS X comes with some system maintenance utilities, but essentials such as a defragmenter or a registry cleaner are notably absent. I would expect a Mini to get really slow and unstable within a couple months if you can�t perform any routine maintenance tasks on it."

http://www.divisiontwo.com/articles/MacMini2.html

[xVariable @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

2-3 seconds is technically impossible, at the hardware level, due to throughput limitations. This is bullshit. Hasn't Microsoft done enough to alienate the technorati with their nonesense? They just seem to be gettng more st00pendous evry day.

[Google Nazi @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

I want at least 3 seconds for time to access the bios otherwise it would suck trying to be superman to get in it.

Secondly, 2-3 seconds to boot vista? You know what? I believe it! Just buy a Pentium 5 (xeon?) 64bit at 8.3ghz, with 8gigs of ram and your in business :)

Otherwise I have trouble believing it.. Or perhaps they mean as soon as you finish typing your password and it logs you inside of windows which takes 2-3 seconds. My pc does that too! I just need to format my pc and not install anything AT ALL for it to happen.

Also while we are on the subject


WHAT IS BETTER?

Pentium 4
Xenon (xeon or whatever)
Centrino? WTF? laptop version of celeron?
AMD Septron or whatever
AMD Athlon
AMD Duron

Assuming that your not comparing with 64bit versions

[Crashnet @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

2-3 Seconds! My N64 took longer then that. So I'm not buying that.

BTW RElapse, perfected? Don't have those things written, while I'm drinking, beer out the nose -- no feel good.

[Tim @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

9: That was a joke right? OS X defragments on the fly and there's no registry to get messed up.

[Jason @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

A registry is a great idea. It's just a config database really, right? It may need tweaking though. I don't like how companies hide startup apps in it, for example. And if Vista really does boot up in three seconds I may finally have a reason to buy a copy of Windows off the shelf (instead of using hand-me-down CDs).

[Persian @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

they arent going to have a registry...They are going to have mini program libraries or something like that. Lost the article

[Colin @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

#9 - that review is a joke.

[Ahmed @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

Have these people ever worked on a PC with M$ software on it before they came out with this 2-3 second limit..i guess it was a tongue slip or a freudian slip to come out with that.

[Winston @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

"2-3 seconds is technically impossible, at the hardware level, due to throughput limitations. This is bullshit"

The article says 2-3 seconds for windows to boot. Thats means 2-3 to boot after you hardware/bios has finished initialising.

[Tom @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

from Wikipedia:

In computing, the windows registry is a database which stores settings and options for the operating system for Microsoft Windows 32-bit versions. It contains information and settings for all the hardware, software, users, and preferences of the PC. Whenever a user makes changes to "Control Panel" settings, or file associations, system policies, or installed software, the changes are reflected and stored in the registry.

On Windows 9x computers, an older installation can have a very large registry that slows down the computer's startup and can make the computer unstable. This has led to frequent criticisms that the registry leads to instability. However, these problems do not usually occur on the Windows NT family of systems, including Windows XP.

[Fresont @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

Hey Mr. Kevin from post #9,

OS X doesn't come with a defragmenter or registry cleaner utility because it doesn't need them. Neither do other unix type operating systems like Linux, BSD, AIX, HP-UX, tru64 and so on. The filesystem used in OS X doesn't require defragmenting to maintain performance. And OS X has no registry like windows, so it doesn't need a registry cleaner. That article you referenced is obviously written by someone who has no idea what he is talking about. Give me a break!

Kevin, do the chickens have large talons?

[Jason @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

xVariable, while this is probably a fudged statistic, I can imagine three seconds. It's just a matter of loading GUI components first (or caching them with new hardware), regardless of whether or not it's ready for you to interact with it. Even if it's just an image that LOOKS like a fully-loaded Windows, the psychological impact would be worth it.

[Fredi Bach @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

Holy shit, that's the worst article I've ever read. Sad thing is that there will be people that actualy believe it.

Btw, OS X does auto-defragmentation and routine maintenance in the background.

Fredi

[stangmatt66 @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

I heard that MS is adding a sleep feature much like the sleep feature in Mac OSX. This could be the "boot" time MS is talking about. It takes a Mac about 2-3 second to wake from sleep.

[Joshua Ochs @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

The problem with the registry is it's a monolithic single point of failure for the entire OS. On any other OS, if you corrupt a config file, that program/service may have problems. If you corrupt the registry - good luck, buddy. Also, being such a huge catch-all for program settings, any program can easily (too easily) modify the data of any other program, which is a security nightmare. It doesn't help that Windows has seemingly endless places to specify boot programs, so spyware and such flourishes.

As for the Mac Mini criticism above, whoever wrote it is a flaming idiot if they think a "registry cleaner" is essential, since there IS NO REGISTRY. Furthermore, OS X defrags on the fly, so disk performance doesn't tend to suffer (if you're working with video or other applications that need a huge amount of contiguous free space, you may still want a defragger, but then again, the built-in Windows one won't help much there either as it defrags files but doesn't consolidate free space).

Back on topic... As a very few other pointed out, there's only so much throughput from the disk to memory, and there is a LOT that will need to be loaded in some fashion to get the machine up and running. Hell, even if you skip a "boot process" and just deal with hibernation, we're talking 10 seconds at least, and that's with not much memory to restore. The only thing that makes any sense is resume from standby in 2-3 seconds. I hate to tell you Bill, OS X resumes in under 1 second (networking and all), and that's a slowdown from earlier versions that woke up literally instantaneously (I couldn't get the lid of my laptop up before it was ready under 10.1).

So... if they're talking about booting or hibernation, they're completely full of shit - it's simply not possible. If they're talking about waking from suspend, then they're still playing catch up. What's the big deal?

[Winston @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

13. "A registry is a great idea. It's just a config database really, right? It may need tweaking though. I don't like how companies hide startup apps in it, for example."

With MSH the registry becomes just an extension of the filesystem anayway - http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=26795

MS should seriously reduce and simplify places apps can load from at startup.

[902SH guy @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

#9, you hit it right on the nose. OSX and other proper *nix don't need craptrap like RegEdit to work. And for the record, OSX has had really basic defragging function built right into the OS (fully auto, you don't even need to run a program) since 10.3.

Oh, and if some app doesn't work, just toss the pref. Worst case, if the app is a bad port from Windows side, you'll need to reinstall the app. Best case, it will just restore the default settings and work. A botched RegEdit would leave you with........


FSM is my master

[OMGWTFBBQ @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

I love how people say hey use Linux or Mac to try to make themselves seem cool geeky 1337. whatever Man, my computer runs Windows XP and I don't have to reboot except every month or when I install new drivers. The System is relatively stable and it allows me to the compatability I need. GET OVER IT, using LINUX does not make you cool DORKS

[Fresont @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

Ok, I'm a total retard and my earlier rant shows it.

Sorry for wasting your time if you read it.

[Jeff @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

"OS X defragments on the fly and there's no registry to get messed up."

There are more things wrong with that statement than I care to count.

But just to focus on the registry issue, nobody likes the registry but the fact is there are settings that the PC's got to store somewhere. The solution that Unix, Linux and Apple use (Apple's OSX being based on BSD, a variant of Unix) is to just store all these settings in a bunch of different files all over the PC. Is this better? Not if you need to change anything, it isn't.

It's an old debate - is geater centralization desirable over having a lot of scattered files? If the registry gets corrupted, an entire PC may get corrupted with it. But on the other hand, it makes it easy on programmers to only have to deal with that one file, and it makes it fairly easy to fix things if something goes wrong (we all back up our registries, but how many Linux users regularly back up all their .conf files? And would most of them even know which one to restore if something went wrong?).

A PC - any PC - does need somewhere to store all of its software settings. Where that's done and how is the only debate. I wouldn't automatically say the way Windows does it is better or worse than the way any other OS does it.

[Mike @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

#9

That article you linked to is completely worthless. It seems like the person who wrote it just emerged out of a cave yesterday and the Mac Mini was his first experience with a computer... Now I'm no MAc enthusiast, but here are just a few "WHAT?!?" moments I had with this article...

a) who uses floppy disk drives anymore?
b) who uses parallel/serial ports anymore?
c) that "weird kind of display connector" is a DVI port which is pretty standard on most modern graphics cards.
d) OS X is not a stripped down operating system
e) Macs don't ship with anti-virus/anti-spyware because there simply aren't as many Mac/OS X viruses in circulation
f) Office does work with Macs, but you have to by the OS X version of Office. You can't just throw your copy of Ofice XP in your Mac and expect it to work.
g) Safari is the browser used by Mac computers, not Internet Explorer
h) how does a keyboard, monitor, mouse, and anti-virus software add $1100 to the price of the Mac Mini?
i) why are you spending that much time running disk defragmenter? You should only have to run that once a month or so.

Again, I own a Windows XP box and no Mac, but open your eyes a little bit, man... Macintosh computers aren't Satan. They're just another option.

[Jonathan @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

FINALLY they are integrating XBox technology into their flagship OS!!

[xVariable @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

To all the MS defenders: The only way they'll be able to acheive this is if they redefine the concept of "bootng Windows", POST or no POST. IOW, it won't actually mean a fully useable desktop in that tme. Indeed, it will take more like 3 times that (incidentally, my p3.2 GHz w/GB RAM and SATA boots to a useable, post POST, in about 14 seconds, but that's after signifigant tweaking).

IOW, MS is lying again, saying down is up.

[PeterG @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

#14. The registry is fubar. It is a single point of failure that has an annoying tendency to corrupt itself or simply grow too big. In either case you computer is hosed.

Configuration makes more sense stored in the application directory. That way one applications configuration change can't trash the whole OS.

[georges @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

Hah, that is the best image i've ever seen on engadget.

TWO FREAKING SECONDS, DUDE!

[Joshua Ochs @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

Jeff #29 - Well, that's all well and good except programmers use system API's to write settings, whether it's to a regsitry or individual files. It makes no difference if it's centralized or decentralized. If I want to write to the registry, I have to specify where in the hierarchy my settings are going. On a Mac it's automatic based on your program signature (such as com.apple.safari) and the file is created in the proper place as necessary. It's not like programmers have to create their own file structures or anything these days - just an API call, same as if you're dealing with the registry or whathaveyou.

However, a centralized registry makes it a lot more fragile, and makes it a lot easier for programs to mess with data that's not theirs. What advantages does it have?

[struddie @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

#9, Kevin. I hope to God that article is a joke or a a piece of satire, anyone reading it as fact should get a reality check.

As for Windows booting in 3 seconds, I'd rather MS put the effort into making stay running for more than 3 hours so the reboot time is irrelevant. But what do I care, I abandoned Windows ages ago an never looked back.

[Deviant @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

Straight from Microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/confident.mspx

[jwb @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

Microsoft has been hounding BIOS writers for years to get the POST time way down. Microsoft is the chief reason modern PCs fly through POST and start booting right away. Microsoft has imposed a maximum time to boot to be able to qualify for the "Designed for Windows XP" logo. I would not be surprised if the standard was faster for the Vista logo program.

[Pork Rind @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

Good Christ, guys! That review is the most blatant piece of satire I've seen in ages! How could you possibly think it's serious with quotes like this:

"When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware--none of which are available for the Mac platform--it doesn't make sense for me to "switch" to a Mac at this time."

It's a joke, son.

[Penguin @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

27: It doesn't count until you take it out of the box.

[Sam @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

OMG.....

#9 pure genious

I do believe some people need to aquire a sense of humor. If you guys read that article again and see if you can pick out that underlying (also a joke) humor then i shall forgive your ignorance.

By the way, i recommend the article link in #9 for anyone who does have the afformentioned personal attribute.

[Andy @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

The problem with that statement is it wont boot in 2secs in a corporate environment.

To trim a profile down you need to reloate the temp dir, move the IE temp files, use SBS2003 to reg hack the profile to store "My Documents" on a NAS or fileserver. The list is endless. After some of the above, you're left with a 100Mb profile - minimum.

But the OS on flash chips and problem solved. Instant boot. We used to do it with BBC B's & the Acorn boxes - why not PC's ?

Andy - Disappointed with this months annoucements. Itunes on a phone, what next ? :-( booooo

[RobERT @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

Simple: the computer is always on, even if you think it is turned off. A new sneaky sleep/hibernation but really "on" thing.

[Mike Smith @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

"Windows Vista processes login scripts and startup programs and services in the background so you can start working right away."

I can see the hacker & virus communities salivating right now...

[eminem213486 @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

ms has said that you will be able to change bios settings through windows with vista. what makes you guys think that we'll even see a frickin bios in the future?

it seems microsoft wants to do away with the bios and make the system all a GUI... seems smart

[RobERT @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

And why do all Microsoft workers look alike (see photo illustrating this article)?: pudgy, pasty white guys whos entire excercise regimen apparently consists of flipping the pages on a menu to see what to order to eat or looking at the reports on the non-moving price of their shares of Microsoft stock, shaking their heads in bewilderment then breaking out in a pig-hot sweat.

[xVariable @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

#s 39 & 41: While I ddn't RTFA, I think you'd do well to visit the link posted by Deviant (#37).

This claim is definitely NOT a joke. If there is a joke in the linked article, it's along the lines of what we've all been saying: Namely, that Windows is a bit of a joke in some ways, and there's no way in hell they'll be able to honestly come by a 2-3 boot time.

Therefore, I'm not really sure what you guys are getting at. I'm sorreh, is that a tad too sober for you? Aww, how unfortunate...

[Penguin @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

Oh, yes. I'm sure the BIOS will eventually die. Just like Elvis and Disco.

[Grandpa @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

1 - My XP system can come back from hibernate in under 5 seconds. And there is a lot going on in a hibernate restore, it's not just loading up mem.

2 - There was quite a fight within the OS folks at MS when the registry was proposed. Basically you are creating a 2nd "file system" with all the attendent redundancy. And you probably aren't going to do make it as robust as the regular file system. The registry folks won.

3 - JUST BECAUSE ANOTHER PLATFORM DOES IT DIFFERENT DOESN'T MEAN IT'S WRONG. Jeez. There are lots of different ways to approach computing problems, all with different strengths and weaknesses.

4 - Rebooting an XP machine is a once a month affair, even for developers. Yah, yah, your's crashes every 2 days, but that's just you loser.

[Dan @ Dec 19th 2005 1:06AM]

#39, Pork Rind: Satire is most effective when the zealots (on either side) actually read it and believe it to be real. It gives the non-zealots an extra laugh at their expense. This article fooled many people back after the release of the mini, and it's still working today - that is a testament to how good this particular piece of satire is.

My favorite line is this:
"For example, there is no Outlook Express for email, but Apple includes a program called Mail, which is like a stripped-down email client that can�t execute scripts or open attachments without user intervention."

Classic!