Faster Boot Times in Windows 8

The software giant Microsoft has been busy updating the Building Windows 8 Blog, through which we found a demonstration of Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8’s fast boot time. In the demonstration, Windows 8 boots up in less than 2 seconds. One of the updates posted are to do with the bootup process for the Windows 8 operating system. Microsoft focused on three key goals for improving the boot time. First, there has to be effectively zero watt power used when off, there needs to be a fresh session after boot, and there needs to be very fast times between pressing the power button and being able to use the PC. Data collected by Microsoft shows that a lot of users prefer to shut down Windows completely over putting their PCs into sleep mode and even hibernation. It might have something to do with people’s preference of totally shutting down their PCs, so that no power is consumed. Resuming session from a hibernate takes a little longer, too. Microsoft chose to add the features of hibernate and cold booting to get the best of both worlds into Windows 8. “Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk. Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested),” Sinofsky states.