This article was published on September 9, 2011

Microsoft demonstrates dramatically improved boot times in Windows 8


Microsoft demonstrates dramatically improved boot times in Windows 8

Microsoft published a post on its Building Windows 8 blog on Thursday, revealing the significantly improved boot times in its upcoming operating system. The company posted a video (embedded below) demonstrating the incredibly fast boot-up sequence as well.

In surveying Windows users, Microsoft found that 57% of desktop users and 45% of notebook users completely power down their machine when not in use, instead of using the sleep function, primarily to eliminate power draw.

Keeping that in mind, the company has created a hybrid of completely shutting down the machine and its previously existing hibernation mode to come up with a solution that decreases the time it takes the OS to boot from a completely shut down state by 30 – 70%.

The hibernation feature in Windows 7 copies the entire user session to the hard disk before shutting down the machine, which takes a lot of time to restore when the machine is booted. In Windows 8, the OS will flush the user session when the machine is shut down but write the kernel session to the disk, eliminating the need for it to build it from scratch, thus saving time.

With this change, all Windows 8 users should see a marked increase in booting times, but SSD users stand to benefit the most. In the demonstration video, Emily Wilson, program manager in the Kernel Platform Group, shows a Windows 8 machine going from completely powered off to fully booted up in just—wait for it—8 seconds!

[Image courtesy of hxdbzxy / Shutterstock.com.]

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