The boot-up showdown

This is kind of silly. Who sits and watches their PC's boot up any way? At work, I never shut down. At home, if the PC is off, switch it on, go get a beer, kiss the wife...

Lets face it, the minute you have an AV, Firewall or two and Anti-Spyware installed, even the mightiest beast of a computer is slow to boot! And if you dont have any of the before mentioned .... please do not network or connect to the internet! The amount of crap online now, and the way it spreads, unbelievable.

Good luck with that >30 second bootup!
 
stoke said:
Windows for Workgroups booted in 12 seconds on a PII 400 with 384MB RAM.
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And on a quadcore Pentium@3GHz with 1gb RAM? :D:D:D

'nyways - I don't care what the bootup time is, as long as the thing boots up without any errors (or, in the case of Linux, fsck's).

We had this same type of discussion on the smoothwall forums, and I feel that boot up times doesn't matter, what's more important is that the OS be stable, and that you can start working after the desktop appeared.

Keep in mind you'll get people who'll start adding eyecandy (comet cursors etc) and that will slow their PC down, and they'll complain :rolleyes:
 
Tsimo said:
i have win 7 on my home pc. it boots from power button to full desktop in between 17 and 19 sec. and that is a dual core amd 939 with 2 gb of ddr 400. it does have 3 160 gb drives striped for the OS. but it is very, very fast.
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My Mac OSX Leopard install on a SATA-2 HDD takes half of that time to boot up.
 
Rouxenator said:
That is because on a machine running windows you can install an endless supply of software to do almost anything you can dream of. As times goes by your typical windows machine ends up with more and more software on it. The simple solutions is just to uninstall something if you do not use.
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Yes Windoze is so badly designed that apps have their settings stored cenrally and then fill up the registry file with garbage and then fail to remove it after being uninstalled. This kills Windows are a few months of usage. Oh and if that REG file becomes corrupted, you're f.... .

On Mac you can install more software, but the sources of such software is very limited as Mac is used only by stange people that want to do strange things.
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On Mac it's different. You have a wide variety of USEFUL software which does not choke a registry. My Mac with 30 different apps installed still
boots up as fast as the day the courier delivered it, possibly even faster because Leopard boots a bit faster than Tiger.
 
Like most of the other posters said already: bootup time is not that significant. My PII 350 takes about 18 sec. to boot from the BIOS spash screen, because I usually let it hibernate. If I need to (re)boot it, I just switch it on and leave it for 3 minutes.

Bootup time does become a problem, however, when you shut down the computer and don't plan ahead for when you need it next (especially true on laptops and netbooks). I've seen people that are pretty impatient with regard to bootup times, and that's on a Core2 Duo 6320 with 2GB RAM running Win XP SP3. The biggest problem with Windows seems to be all the services that are started once the desktop is done loading.
 
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Rouxenator said:
That is because on a machine running windows you can install an endless supply of software to do almost anything you can dream of. As times goes by your typical windows machine ends up with more and more software on it. The simple solutions is just to uninstall something if you do not use.
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The annoying thing with Windows software is that a lot of applications that shouldn't really need to run at start up have components that load when the machine starts up. I mean do I really need the adobe speed launcher or whatever at boot time? And the Java Updater? I mean come on! All the junk that needs to load slows things down...
 
PeterCH said:
My Mac OSX Leopard install on a SATA-2 HDD takes half of that time to boot up.
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He didn't give the spec of his HDD etc.. so I wouldn't even compare it.

But yea... my pc is on 24/7. As long as I don't have to wait a decade I'm fine
 
Ubuntu vs XPsp3

I use an HP Compaq 6710b, 2GB Ram running XPsp3 for work. I have a few extras installed like CS2, Freehand MXa and Coreldraw. I also have Rocketdock and Stardock :)

At home, on the other hand, I have a Dell Optiplex GX 270 with 2 x 250 GB HDD, 512 MB SD Ram ATI Radeon 9200SE AGP card (Yes, I had to change its profile with a grinder... dont ask :) )dual booting XPSP2 and Linux Mint Elyssa.

My laptop takes about 5 minutes to become usable when booting xp off the hdd. To check, I livebooted mint. 30 secs max.

My pc, on the other hand... XP boots in about 2 minutes... fully usable. Mint takes about 20 secs. Keep in mind that this is a fully stripped down XP with ONLY absolutely necessary startup processes.

Now for my 5 cents: Ive ben investigating using my DTP apps under wine simply because I cant handle waiting 5 minutes before I can use anything on my machine. Now that I know it works fine, Im trying to get Pitstop to work too. As soon as I get this right, Im gonna make the permanent switch. Sorry XP, but youve become too much of a time waster. BTW: for those looking for an alternative to CS3, try Scribus!
 
23 secs 29 secs or 2mins i am a creature of old habits sorry for you.
 
ok honestly... who gives a $%^& how fast it takes to boot up?
is that now the new benchmark to determine whether or not the operating system is worth using or not? "wow, mine booted in 10 seconds, so there for i will use it this operating system"
 
Murmaider said:
ok honestly... who gives a $%^& how fast it takes to boot up?
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I do! Every saturday I boot up the newest version of every linux distro and every version of windows from 95 up. One that boots up the fastest is the one I use for the week. Sure, if Ubuntu wins I'll have to put off playing crysis for a week, and if win 95 starts up the fastest i'll have to live without network drivers. By hey, that's the price I pay to have a 0.4second (total savings of 2.8 seconds a week!) increase in bootup, well worth it!
 
Garyvdh said:
Why does it have to be a war?

Why can't we just keep working to make them both boot faster?

Personally I use both and would like them both to boot fast.

nuff said. Thanks.
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Good question. Never thought about it in such a girlie way. Peace be onto ye all, lets try our best but remember this is not a competition guys it is just a friendly, "let's see if we can get it there" kinda thing.

STUFF IT!!!

WAR IS MUCH MORE FUN!!! :D
 
Murmaider said:
ok honestly... who gives a $%^& how fast it takes to boot up?
is that now the new benchmark to determine whether or not the operating system is worth using or not? "wow, mine booted in 10 seconds, so there for i will use it this operating system"
Click to expand...

We all care, especially when you are in a hurry, but I understand where you are coming from. My desktops just run, they rarely are shut down and restarted but my netbook needs to be quick. You carry it from one scene to the next. It needs to be ready or down for action quick quick!
 
eltherza said:
I do! Every saturday I boot up the newest version of every linux distro and every version of windows from 95 up. One that boots up the fastest is the one I use for the week. Sure, if Ubuntu wins I'll have to put off playing crysis for a week, and if win 95 starts up the fastest i'll have to live without network drivers. By hey, that's the price I pay to have a 0.4second (total savings of 2.8 seconds a week!) increase in bootup, well worth it!
Click to expand...
LOL!
 
Ok, so Win7 boots faster. As has been said, after a while the registry will get bloated and everything will slow down. But wait (;)), don't forget the AV software - as the number of definitions increase, that also slows down the whole system too.

Since I added AV (avira) to my missus's PC (XP) the boot time has gone from about 10s to nearly 40s...
 
zamicro said:
I wish I had a PII in those days... I had a 386dx40 which was damn slow. Probably took a few minutes to start wfw.
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I had 8MB RAM in my 386DX40 and it had a TI 387 Mathco. It booted windows 95 pretty well and the matchco did make for better performance in Doom2.

Funny thing is - whenever someone speaks of an 40Mhz 386 you can be sure it was an AMD because intel's 386es topped out at 33Mhz (OK maybe a Cyrix). The Am386DX-40 was awesome because on 386 the FSB and CPU speed were still 1:1 so using a AMD 386 40Mhz you could have a maximum memory throughput of 152.6MB/s !

Sorry - I got carried away - but I am passionate about old PC stuff.
 
What are you all on about: Windows load time is an important factor. We could all do with faster load times. I mean in life there's time wasted in traffic, various endless qeues and then there's time wasted waiting for Windows. Of course the ultimate goal would be an instant on PC like the good old Commodore 64. My reason for having faster load times would be the fact that Windows still needs to be restarted way too often. Device drivers, services, application installations, PC name changes and uninstalls are list of reasons to reboot which can be really annoying. Sometimes, in fact, most times, if not absolutely necessary, I'll put off rebooting till starting up the following day. So while I'll agree that load time is not really a consideration when it comes to choosing a OS, I have to say I'm glad it is an issue being dealt with.
 
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