ASRock's Instant Boot: 0 to Vista in 4 seconds

ASRock has a ploy to sell more of its motherboards: Instant Boot. The BIOS update for select MoBos promises to boot XP or Vista systems 10 times faster than standard PCs -- in other words, about 3 to 4 seconds from a full shutdown. ASRock achieves this minor of miracles through manipulation of the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface that Microsoft manipulates for its sleep and hibernate modes. At the risk of oversimplification, ASRock appears to add the processing baggage to the backend of the shutdown process, essentially rebooting the OS and then dropping it into a suspended state ready to instantly pop on the next time you hit the power button. Pretty smart actually. Here's the catch: the system you're using must be limited to a single user account without any password protection -- a definite no-no for corporate environments. See what happens when Hugo and George steal Dad's camcorder after the break.

[Thanks, Daniel]

[Mischa Lockton @ Nov 14th 2008 6:45AM]

no password and single user wont even cut it in my house

[Kiwi616 @ Nov 14th 2008 9:32AM]

Why not modify this start-up to include a password prompt prior to start-up??? It seems pretty simple.

[eiki @ Nov 14th 2008 10:24AM]

....to protect your pr0ndentity!

[OneLove @ Nov 14th 2008 11:25AM]

does he want to fight?

[Rohit Kapur @ Nov 14th 2008 6:51AM]

That was. . . entertaining.

[ybd @ Nov 14th 2008 10:44AM]

Oh... my god. How come... your computer... booted up so fast.

[Samboini @ Nov 14th 2008 12:39PM]

Meme in 3, 2, 1...

[Anthony @ Nov 14th 2008 1:07PM]

UGHHHH SOO SLOWWW !!

[SimbaDogg @ Nov 14th 2008 2:23PM]

i love this guy...speaks perfect english, perfect grammar but w/ a sweet ass accent. "hey george, say hi to everybody...yeah"

[Str1ker @ Nov 14th 2008 6:52AM]

Very impressive.

But password comes first, sorry.

[Tonicboy @ Nov 14th 2008 8:06AM]

But is it really that impressive at all? My laptop is almost always on and I'm only rebooting if some install or something requires it. If this takes the time from bootup and sticks it onto the shutdown, the overall time to reboot is the same. Furthermore, it's no faster than a start from hibernate, which is what I use in place of a full shutdown (and which allows multiple user accounts and passwords, thankyouverymuch).

[Unknown @ Nov 14th 2008 7:03AM]

Awesome video! I really felt the pathos of his "Oh... so slow" at 3:09.

Here's an article by a couple of guys who managed to get Linux to boot in 5 seconds:

http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/

[icepop4who @ Nov 14th 2008 8:30AM]

but that's linux

[rumblejazz @ Nov 14th 2008 6:55AM]

"Devices used to introduce a stream of water into the body for medical or hygienic reasons, or the stream of water itself."

[Totalfixation @ Nov 14th 2008 6:54AM]

Even though some are saying they need a password protected pc. Maybe at least this will reduce a certain amount of time for boot up.

[Kelmon @ Nov 14th 2008 7:07AM]

With luck, this sort of development will do away with the need to "boot" at all. Unless I need to install system updates that require a full restart, I can't think of a reason why I'd want to have to close down all my applications and documents. For this reason I always use a sleep function and then I can just continue from where I was the next time my computer is started.

[MMaster23 @ Nov 14th 2008 6:57AM]

We call it .. S3

[Roger @ Nov 14th 2008 6:57AM]

lol is it the guy from the famous LGA775 motherboard installation vid found on youtube?

[danrod43 @ Nov 14th 2008 6:59AM]

Is it too early to start generating oscar buzz for these boys?

[Samboini @ Nov 14th 2008 1:48PM]

If you're thinking of the 2089 awards held on Mars, than just, yes.

[Kelmon @ Nov 14th 2008 7:04AM]

In some respects this research sounds like Deep Sleep, i.e. entering a suspended state with the contents of memory written to the disk and the power turned off. This is something I sometimes use on my MacBook Pro when traveling for extended periods where battery drain during a normal sleep is unacceptable. However, the report's restore time of about 4-seconds is SIGNIFICANTLY faster than anything I see when restoring state (about 20-seconds, at a guess). So this is something that sounds damned useful and certainly much more useful than this silly idea of an instant-on OS that only does a couple of things.

Deep Sleep on the Mac also does not require the user to re-authenticate when woken by default, although I think that can be enabled. However, I am quite sure that the authentication available will be nothing much more than a password protected screensaver, so improvements there for security is definitely required.

[schmitty338 @ Nov 14th 2008 9:47AM]

Ummm...that's more like Windows Hibernate...that takes much longer than this to restore, especially when you have 4GB+ of RAM.

This offers a fresh boot of windows...i'm assuming it increases shutdown time in order to decrease boot up time.

[Kelmon @ Nov 14th 2008 10:05AM]

@schmitty338

It does not surprise me that Vista has an equivalent to Deep Sleep, and I'm not even certain that is the correct name of it for the Mac (I downloaded a widget for Dashboard that enables the Deep Sleep option to be used otherwise simply closing the lid sends the laptop into a normal sleep).

The thing here is that I don't see why you would want a clean boot of the OS. If you need to reboot your PC then you have to close all your documents and applications, and then relaunch them when the boot up has completed. This is an unnecessary hassle. Unless an OS update appears that requires a reboot then my computer will go for months without being rebooted. A computer that can be put into a sleep state whereby it saves its memory into a non-volatile medium and draws no power whilst being able to restore state in a couple of seconds sounds pretty whizzy to me. If it wants to restart the OS then I'm much less interested.

[Super S @ Nov 14th 2008 2:12PM]

Every once and a while you just need to do a RAM dump. Windows is bad for allowing ghost processes to run after closing a program.

[Kelmon @ Nov 15th 2008 6:59AM]

@Super S

Without wanting to get into an OS debate, is that still not fixed even in Vista? On a modern computer it should not be necessary to have to reboot after x-period of time. Rather, you should only need to restart if you are installing system files.

[Macfly @ Nov 14th 2008 7:20AM]

After seeing the vid, I just could'nt help but think of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaiMi66DK14

[baker_tony @ Nov 14th 2008 10:34AM]

Damn, that's funny!

[majortom1981 @ Nov 14th 2008 7:11AM]

This is not a boot up its just a pc thats wakes up from sleep quicker.

ITs sort of FALSE advertising. Notice how there is no bios boot up or windows boot up screens?

ITs just a faster wakeup from sleep mode thats all.

[Ignatius @ Nov 14th 2008 7:28AM]

Why are you complaining? For all intents and purposes, it's instant boot without the power drain of the system being on 24/7.

[Kelmon @ Nov 14th 2008 7:58AM]

Boot Up = BAD

With luck, this development will make the boot cycle a thing of the past (well, you know what I mean).

[icepop4who @ Nov 14th 2008 8:42AM]

The difference between Instant Boot and waking up a system from sleep mode is that you have to reboot your computer and then put it into sleep mode or hibernating mode. In Instant Boot, the motherboard does this automatically during shutdown so that when you do an Instant Boot, you are using a fresh boot up of Vista.

Instant Boot does NOT wake up faster than sleep mode, for the record. The advantage is that you get to work with a clean boot of Vista.

[Yoshi1080 @ Nov 14th 2008 7:19AM]

In the video it says that “fast mode” (3–4s) does only work when the power supply is kept plugged in which seems to be the same as hibernate. How long would it boot using the “regular mode”? Would it still be faster or just be a normal boot? Foxconn has a feature which basically eliminates the POSTing time by storing those information in a chip. ATM this seems more solid to me.

[icepop4who @ Nov 14th 2008 8:54AM]

Woah, hold on there people. Get it right: hibernating stores your RAM into your harddrive, which is reloaded into the RAM when you resume from hibernation. Hibernatin also completely shutdown your system, so you can unplug the system and still be able to resume after the power is reconnected.

Sleep or Standby mode activates your RAM only so you save power, but since RAM is volatile, a loss of power will cause the RAM to lose its contents.

POST time is actually pretty short at around 2-5 seconds in my experience; It's the windows startup that takes the majority of boot time.

According to broli (user below), Regular mode stores boot information on Flash memory, which should be much faster than any traditional harddrive. Logically, this will make Instant Boot faster than waking up from hibernation.

P.S. Do not change components when your system is hibernated, especially RAM; this may cause errors and BSoD.

[Kelmon @ Nov 14th 2008 10:13AM]

I'm not sure if Windows does this as well now, but there's an in-between sleep state that seems to be default on current Mac laptops (well, definitely on a Oct 2006 MacBook Pro). I think this state is called Safe Sleep and it tries to combine the best points of Sleep and Hibernate. Basically, when the laptop is put to sleep it backs up the contents of memory to the disk (like Hibernate) but it maintains the contents of memory using power (like Sleep). When woken the laptop will simply restart from its Sleep state but if the memory is empty because power ran out then it will repopulate the memory with what was recorded to the disk, like it was starting from Hibernate. This gives a nice safety net but does mean that you lose space on your disk equal to the quantity of RAM in your computer and also the time taken to go to sleep is longer.

This doesn't advance the discussion much (sorry about that) but since you were talking about Sleep and Hibernate I thought I'd throw in another option. Carry on...

[willikampmann @ Nov 14th 2008 11:25AM]

@icepop: You’re right, I didn’t use the correct technical term. Still, from what I read on the AsRock website, InstantBoot basically has the same boot times as S3/S4 and only differs in that it boots from a fresh image rather than from the hibernation file. On the website there is no mention of a special flash memory to store the data on in “regular mode”; and technically it is based on S4 (and S3 for “fast mode”, respectively): http://www.asrock.com/feature/InstantBoot/index.asp

So booting in 4 seconds AND completely plugging off the computer apparently does not work.

[willikampmann @ Nov 14th 2008 11:33AM]

@icepop: You’re right, I didn’t use the correct technical term. Still, from what I read on the AsRock website, InstantBoot basically has the same boot times as S3/S4 and only differs in that it boots from a fresh image rather than from the hibernation file. On the website there is no mention of a special flash memory to store the data on in “regular mode”; and technically it is based on S4 (and S3 for “fast mode”, respectively): http://www.asrock.com/feature/InstantBoot/index.asp

So booting in 4 seconds AND completely plugging off the computer apparently does not work.

From what it does, “regular mode” seems to be comparable to HORM (Hibernate once resume many) on Windows XPe.

(hope I get the reply right this time)

[Jagster @ Nov 14th 2008 1:31PM]

@Kelmon

Vista has the same funtionality, it's named Hybrid Sleep.

[balls @ Nov 14th 2008 3:16PM]

@Kelmon: Yes thats true, however it's implementation is ass.

Because the MBP is writing upwards of of 4GB to disk, it takes an extra 30-60 seconds for your laptop to go to "sleep."

So you have to either plan ahead, and give your laptop time to go to sleep before you move it; wait for it to finish; or go to regular sleep, which just goes into low-power operation.

[Kelmon @ Nov 15th 2008 7:07AM]

@balls

Well, it's been a couple of years now but just closing the lid and moving the laptop hasn't resulted in problems yet, although I expect that either dropping it or waving it around wouldn't be wise.

@Jagster

Cheers for the confirmation.

[siriusdouble @ Nov 25th 2008 11:08PM]

@Kelmon

Well twice now (all within the past 2 months actually) I've had my Macbook crash on sleep... i heard somewhere that it's due to a clash between safe sleep and the sudden motion sensor... as in.. if the SMS gets activated while the system is performing a safe sleep, it crashes.. the worst thing is, the computer never gets to sleep, so u have a system that is on, lid closed, and most probably in a insulated laptop sleeve/pocket, causing potential damage due to overheating... yea.

I'd assume this problem could be corrected via a firmware update, or even just software update.. but it's still yet to come as far as i know...

[Anthony @ Nov 14th 2008 7:52AM]

The best way stays to let Windows switched off ;-)

[Chris @ Nov 14th 2008 7:20AM]

That was by far one of the most entertaining things I've seen all year :)

[MarbleMind @ Nov 14th 2008 7:21AM]

Wow, quite a feat to pull off for a company mainly known for bargain (yet sometimes quite nifty) scotch-tape-and-string motherboard contraptions. Make it multi-user capable, strap it on a "full-grown" Asus board and people might just take it seriously.

Oh, and of course the most adorably nerdy presentation ever. Thumbs up!

[nak @ Nov 14th 2008 7:24AM]

*sigh*

Nice, but, yah.

We'll be there someday.

[Rakar @ Nov 14th 2008 7:27AM]

WHY NOT?

[broli @ Nov 14th 2008 7:36AM]

Fast mode: Keeps only RAM on juice.
Regular mode: Stores RAM content in flash memory on mobo.

[dotAaron @ Nov 14th 2008 8:00AM]

"On the left side with a traditional boot up machine his name is HUGO!"

*pause*

"YEAH!!!!"

xD

[nanobis @ Nov 14th 2008 8:00AM]

thats fair cool, tho i will bet it sort of depends on your start up progs. If there a lot i guess it might slow it down.

[majortom1981 @ Nov 14th 2008 8:09AM]

Its not BOOTING up it just makes waking up from sleep faster.

[Tommy @ Nov 14th 2008 8:05AM]

Isn't it better to create just a simple sw tool which does run-once procedure, which puts PC into a sleep mode after reboot than buying a new motherboard from these wise-guys?