Windows 8 Dramatically Cuts Boot Time

👤by Tony Le Bourne Comments 📅09.09.2011 12:53:08



Microsoft is claiming that Windows 8 will benefit from 30-70% faster boot times by creating a new fast startup mode. Fast startup is a hybrid of a 'cold boot' and hibernation which, from a near zero watt power state, the system reads a 'hiberfile' on startup which effectively creates a short cut into a new session.


Sample of test results from System Integration Test lab systems.
Click to see a bigger version of this chart.


It’s faster because resuming the hibernated system session is comparatively less work than doing a full system initialization, but it’s also faster because we added a new multi-phase resume capability, which is able to use all of the cores in a multi-core system in parallel, to split the work of reading from the hiberfile and decompressing the contents. For those of you who prefer hibernating, this also results in faster resumes from hibernate as well.



Representation of different phases between cold boot and fast startup.
Click to see a bigger version of this chart.


Boot time is, arguably, an important factor in user experience and it is just one of many new features expected to come in Windows 8.

For more information and source material visit:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/08/delivering-fast-boot-times-in-windows-8.aspx



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