Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 1st Sep 2008 08:55 UTC, submitted by Dan Warne
A common topic of discussion in the Windows world - in fact, in any operating system - is boot performance. Many systems take a long time to reach a usable desktop from the moment the power switch is pressed, and this can be quite annoying if it takes too long. In a post on the Engineering 7 blog, Michael Fortin, lead engineer of Microsoft's Fundamentals/Core Operating System Group, explains what Microsoft is doing to make Windows 7 boot faster.
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Member since:
2008-01-01
Definitely, those 2 boot metrics (boot and login) are crucial to both performance, downtime and user experience.
About boot time, both Linux (initng) and Windows are trying to improve by parallelizing the tasks and this is a good thing. Normally you lookup devices, load drivers, start services, decide which services can be deferred and which are needed right now because it's a boot due to an installation/upgrade. And very often scripts that do that either are synchronous or are being executed synchronously. This is room for improvement and every OS should try to be better and better at it since both developers and testers that work hard before any app is RTM'd and they reboot quite often.
Login time is a different thing, but we expect a lot from computers these days upon login. You'd like your RSS feeds ready, email checked, AV software updated and so on. A lot of apps are trying to work as soon as you login. Who knows maybe low priority i/o in windows 6 and windows 7 would help. I bet noone but microsoft really uses these right now.