OSNews

I disagree. As humans we should try to excel at everything we do.

If all people had the attitude you express, all human progress would have stopped in the 18th Century.

Edited 2008-09-01 09:33 UTC

Of course, but we need to make preferences. I will prefer safer and easier Windows over fast boot time any day. MS should shift their devs to stuff that matters more.

But as this clearly means something else for evey user, that is a moot point.

So you see an importance for devs, but still you insist that boot time is not important? Boot time IS important. I'm testing computers and software a lot in my company, and it's annoying to spend hours every day to just wait for Windows to reboot. This is just wasted time. Also, when you just want to quickly start your computer to lok for something you don't want to wait ages until it's up and running. Boot time CAN be improved though, my MacBook proves it: It boots from nothing to a fully usable desktop in ~30 secs. When I put it to sleep, Mac OS takes less time to wake up than I need to fully open the display.

So what ? One of my machines - which also serves as a multimedia pc - has Windows on it, is always shut down into hibernation, and it "boots" up below 20 seconds. I don't need faster than that, better get those people working on features that matter.

Boot time is important.
For servers it reduces downtime.
For consumer electronics is improves the user experience ( Sony has Linux booting down to less than 5 sec on their TV sets .. but that is still way too long.)

And after all it is just nice to not wait for stupid stuff like the computer booting into a usable state.

You know, I'm willing to bet this is pretty much the only reason MS is working so much on the boot time issue. If it were just an issue of user experience, they'd continue to fall back on their "our (carefully controlled) lab tests (with impossibly awesome hardware) clearly prove that Vista is the fastest system ever!" story.

I've shopped for Windows-based hosting exactly never, but I don't imagine there are that many offerings running on Vista, and the few that exist probably don't offer 99.999% uptime. MS knows they have to have something with acceptable boot performance out before Windows Server 2003 reaches end-of-life, or there will be a lot of companies jumping ship.

Why do they have to boot Linux at all on their TVs? They could use solid state memory and simply load up with out running through a boot process.

Well, even if you don't boot that often - it's one less argument for *insert_os_other_than_windows* fanboy mob to rant about on their blogs

You see people complaining about how there are no real benefits/iprovements to Vista over XP, but as soon as MS is actualy trying to optimize something for their next release they ask "why?". WTF?

"You see people complaining about how there are no real benefits/iprovements to Vista over XP, but as soon as MS is actualy trying to optimize something for their next release they ask "why?". WTF?"

1: It's not necessarily the same group of people saying both things.
2: those two sentiments are not mutually exclusive. The planned boot speed improvements are to be for Windows 7, not Vista.
[/rocketScience]

I for one don't like waiting for yonks for my laptop to boot up on the way to work. With my home box i totally agree but for mobile systems which get turned on and off to conserve battery life boot time is very important.

IMHO that`s what various sleep and hibernation states are for. THAT is a real development. Not being forced to close apps, reboot, and open all those apps and document over again.

I speak from home/non-dev professional (video) perspective.

I would rather they make it so I don't have to reboot as much.

A very large number of Windows users seem to shutdown and reboot their machines rather than using hibernate. Fortin's team gets this from telemetry data. When summed over the population of Windows users, a 10 second improvement in boot time is probably several months worth of human time saved per day.

http://www.splashtop.com/
Have a look here for ideas why its a good idea.