Submitted by “Anyone else remember when Microsoft used to talk about making Windows Vista (or Longhorn, as it was then known) a fast-booting operating system. Fast, as in cold boots that were 50 percent faster than those possible with Windows XP? Something obviously went awry. As Computerworld is reporting, a number of Vista users are none too happy about Vista boot-up times. Some are questioning whether Microsoft is advocating that users just put Vista into sleep mode, as opposed to shutting down systems on a daily basis, to mask the sluggish boot up.”
Core Duo 1.7 laptop is by no means a ‘fast’ computer.
Boot times (not bios…that’s not windows) is about 15 seconds to log on promt. Never had xp on here to compare – but that’s not ‘slow’ Not super fast, but it ain’t slow. although faster IS better I am in no way held, back, locked in, or otherwise hurt by waiting 15 seconds in the event that I actually fully shut down / restart.
I had a dual boot [for a while, until I realized that Fedora was useless] with Vista and Fedora on an HP nc8430. Vista booted in about the time you mentioned…13 – 15 seconds [after bios] to a logon prompt. Fedora took 45 seconds. I’m sure if I read manuals, recompiled code, Googled for a few hours, and played with “*.conf” files I could have reduced the boot time, but I actually have to work.
Edited 2007-04-11 18:12
Lame attempt at trolling. This is osnews, by the way, so if tinkering with various OSes for the sake of it doesn’t appeal to you, I suggest you go check how Paul Thurrott is doing.
Edited 2007-04-11 18:52
In OSNews, one is called trolling if he bashed linux, any distro, eventhough it’s true. It will be modded down instantly to make it disappear. Bashing windows at any topics will give one +5 mod up (see 2nd comment and its reply). Deep thinking, carefully written comment receive at max +3 mod up.
Edited 2007-04-12 04:53
Can I ask how he is trolling because I can report the same experience with the boot process…with XP not Vista in my case.
It is trolling because the article isn’t about a Windows vs. Linux comparison, but rather a XP vs. Vista comparison, and the failed promise that boot times would be drastically lowered with Vista.
By the way, when you get to the desktop in Windows the system is still booting – there’s plenty of stuff that isn’t loaded yet…and it is possible to boot a command-line Linux in less than five seconds, IIRC…
suryad, you ask how he is trolling ? well, i think you need to see the movie ” monty python the holy grail” and observe very closely the witch scene. ( q. how do you she’s a witch ? a. because she looks like one ! ) anyway, that’s my take on why jebb thinks tmanop2006 is a troll.
Core duos actually *are* pretty fast machines, actually, but since that is what many Vista systems are running on, that is irrelevant for the topic (should I mod myself down for going off topic?).
I suspect that many of these complaints are due to underspecced systems (the Best Buy near here seems to really enjoy giving users 512Mb of memory, even on Vista systems).
Having said that, on my test system at work, the boot time for Vista is actually twice that of XP on the same exact hardware. There is no indication of any problems in device manager, the system logs, etc. By the way, the system rates a 2.8 (I think; it’s been a while since I ran the thing) on Microsoft’s performance meter.
As always Vista boot times will vary by HW. Mostly I think it has to do with the drivers . If you’re using all the default Vista drivers included with the OS you’ll probably get better boot times than with downloaded 3rd party drivers, especially legacy drivers.
So once you throw in crufty HP printer drivers, ATI video drivers, Creative audio drivers, and random USB devices you’ll probably see boot times go up.
Edited 2007-04-11 20:20
Agreed, but on the system in question, I stuck with the standard Vista drivers. I wanted to take it for a spin “as is” out of the box and use only what Microsoft provided (IE7, Windows Mail, etc.) to see what my experience would be like. It was, after all, hyped by Microsoft as by far their best OS ever.
I did a clean install of Vista Business (gotta love that Action Pack subscription the company has). Overall, other than UAC being annoying (which I expected, ymmv) and a blue screen (when I was trying to install a CD burning app because the native CD burning just didn’t work on my system) I found it to be a reasonably solid but extremely resource-hungry system. I worked exclusively with Vista for two weeks and didn’t have a whole lot of major problems.
After the two weeks I went back to my linux installs because I personally am more productive using them. I will perhaps revisit Vista when some of its growing pains have gone away, but I will not personally purchase it because I do not approve of Microsoft’s business practices and do not want to give them my financial support (it does not bother some people, and hey – more power to them; doesn’t bother me).
It’s not what that many Vista systems are running on though. Just take a look through PC World* at their budget systems (be it laptop of desktop). All have Vista on and all grossly underspeced for the bloated OS.
* I’m sure most over high-street IT / electrical store are the same.
I agree (I said as much in the rest of my post). Until the “default” setups are updated, those stores and OEMs are going to continue to field a lot of complaints.
So I have my DSLR that can take decent videos, and I have a fresh install of Vista Ultimate on my Acer Aspire 5102wlmi (google it for specs). Here’s a video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ICBUMEdUEs
(didn’t realize you could see me that well while I was taking it–would have waved or something)
I don’t really have an opinion on boot times either way. I don’t think it’s slow, and I don’t think it’s amazingly fast. However, I did realize instantly “why” they made the shutdown button hibernate by default. That’s hell to change, by the way.
Maybe the fast boot times are when using ReadyBoost(?) with those hybrid drives. 15 seconds isn’t bad. Besides most of my problems with boot times are due to 3rd party apps running stuff at startup.
15 seconds on a Core Duo 1.7 … that’s pretty bad. It may not be a speedmonster compared with what you can buy today (relatively), but it is a speedmonster. Heck, it shouldn’t take more than 5-6 seconds with such a machine.
You have the newest desktop processor architecture out there and claim it being “not fast”?! Hell, what are you people thinking how fast a computer should be then?
I have an old Athlon XP 1900+ system and tend to say it’s “fast enough”. It boots in 16 seconds, btw.:
http://fopref.meinungsverstaerker.de/div/bootchart1.png
It seems to me that everybody gets used to that only bleeding edge hadware can operate “fast”. I just wonder how people where able to do DTP and 3D rendering in 1990 then…
Actually there is no point to have fast boot time, but after booting you still turn on all needed services manually. I’m not using vista, but in OSX, I never shut down my MBP, I just simply close the lid and let it in sleep mode. So I agree with hibernate instead shutdown suggestion.
I use hibernate myself, for the very same reason. But perhaps did you reply to the wrong post?
When has Microsoft ever failed to deliver a promised feature? I’m shocked by this revelation.
They were supposed to release their version of Linux in 2003.
Where is it ?
Why delay so long ?
http://www.mslinux.org/
Looks good though.
I consider that blasphemy :p
But no. I believe MS got cold feet when they realised Windows with Unix services was better than Windows proper
Or something like that :p
“”””
“”””
How can they charge for Linux when it’s under the open source licence? (GPL is it?)
Plus, more to the point, wouldn’t it make more sense (from Microsofts perspective) to update their UNIX OS rather than draw more attention to Linux
[edit]
doh – the penny just dropped lol
Edited 2007-04-12 20:23
rotfl, raver31 😉
Yeah, if only the display would wake up after resuming from Standby/Sleep mode with NVidia cards…
I don’t even know what to say about Vista – the crappiest OS MS has ever released. A bunch of crappy visual effects on top of whats gotta be the buggiest OS ever. Clock keeps resetting to Jan 1, 2005, half my programs barely work, slow as hell (about twice as slow as XP)… just copying simple files takes forever – I seriously don’t see why anyone would pick Vista over… anything.
Perhaps you should blame your system (or perhaps you are having driver issues) and not the OS.
BTW, your system setting back to the wrong time (especially 2005) is NOT Vista’s fault.
You don’t know that. Windows can modify the BIOS clock on shutdown. In that case it is the fault of Windows. OTOH, if it happens also with other OS’es being the fault of Vista can be ruled out. But just ruling it out like you do is plain wrong.
It’s not plain wrong because there is no function to do that, not to mention it would be a widespread problem, and it’s not.
Biggest thing to check is if you have it set to sync up with a time server.
Vista (or any OS) will not just change the time and date unless it was told to.
Of course… silly me. There is no such function.
Just because my Windows 2003 Server installation modifies the BIOS clock on shutdown it doesn’t mean it’s possible. Not to mention my Gentoo Linux system also modifies the BIOS clock on shutdown. But oh no… the almighty Microse… ehh… CPUGuy has spoken. It is not possible to modify the BIOS clock through software. Nor is it possible to configure Windows (or any other OS) to do so.
Silly me :p
Maybe you’re using (I said MAYBE) a pirate copy of Vista with a ClockStop Crack? That would perform your “clock reset bug”
Now now. I am not the one to use Vista.
It was the original poster that used Vista and had that bug:
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17671&comment_id=229654
However, if it is pirated one is asking for trouble. Don’t use warez. It’s not healthy for your machine and more often than not illegal (though with exceptions).
Personally I run Win2K3 Server from MSDN AA (well, mostly I run Linux, but I do have Win2K3 installed).
It is not a pirated version – I have activated it and everything. I’m no saint but I do buy all the software that I use frequently, especially my OS.
As far as the display issue – if you go to Nvidia’s message boards, you’ll see that I’m nowhere near the only one to have this problem at all. If you do some research, you’ll find out that people with S3 cards (I know they’re considered crap but that’s mostly in terms of gaming and they’re still a known brand) and several others experience it too.
Also, I’m no Microsoft hater either – I use a lot of their products on a daily basis (SQL Server, Visual Studio, .NET, etc – all great products) and I generally like their OS’s but I think they messed up really bad with Vista. Again, that’s just my personal experience so far and personal opinion – take it or leave it.
Thank you.
No Windows OS provides a way to disable this syncing of the BIOS clock. Windows effectively erodes the convention of having the BIOS clock at UTC and causes much torment to *nix users.
>>Biggest thing to check is if you have it set to sync up with a time server.
And your CMOS battery! 😉
Most people don’t have these problems, so I can see why they use it. I’m surprised that you think this sort of experience is expected on a modern OS and think that’s the way Vista is. Unless you’re looking for Vista to be bad, you’d think that something was broken with your install and you’d do something to fix it.
If you’re interested in my help, reply to this post with a way for me to contact you and we can find out what’s going on privately.
while 15 seconds isnt bad it sure isnt good. after tweaking my XP install i can get it to boot to being fully useable and ready to go in oder 7 seconds (that is after bios) and with bios about a 10 second boot total time. vista has ne excuse…
I had to register just to ask you WTF have you done to make it boot in 10s???
about 12 regestry entires, disable system restore, lots of changes to ms config and dissableling unneccesary start up services, and changing windows ability to manage memory so on start up it allocates as much as it wants to the start up process for windows specific components, and making usre u dont have a lot (any) software that starts up with windows….maybe i should post a guid….. hmmm
I would be very interested to read your guide
OH GOD, MY EYES!
Please, please, please, download the newest Firefox and use the built-in spell check. Ye-gads. I swear, that made me lose brain-cells. And I know this makes me a bit of a jerk, but after reading that and seeing the phrase “maybe I should write a guide or something.” … oh my, you mean pages of writing like that? I want to shoot myself! >.< (Yeah yeah, mod me down for being anal about it, but it’s rude to write that way, it shows a complete disrespect for everyone who will ever see what you wrote.)
Now, that aside: Why would you bother using something that you have to go through so much trouble to configure?
Mind you, I do that for the sake of doing it all the time, as well as stupid things like getting XP small enough to run on 24MB or RAM or whatnot… but… if someone has to break windows to get a comparable boot-up time to old XP on hardware that’s twice as fast (XP at first release would boot up on my Pentium III-866 with SCSI-U160 and 512MB memory in around 13 seconds with a fresh install.)… ok, correction, 3-5 times as fast… well, it seems there is something rather wrong there?
Why the hell can’t Microsoft just set all non-required services to manual, then make them actually start when you try to use them (on every version of windows I’ve tried… if you set print spooler to manual it will never start again unless you start it from services.msc yourself, while most others will do what they are supposed to.)
I’ve never seen XP boot in less than 30s. Even the nLited versions!
Disabling services doesn’t affect the system performances.
You can disable a lot of services in Windows XP and nothing changes. And this is true also in Windows Vista, where you have a better memory managment
I use XP on my laptop (got a PCMCIA wifi card that hates Linux and I’m too cheap to buy a new one quite yet) and I’m thrilled to get my boot to the login screen in thirty seconds, never mind the time it takes to login and start the background apps until the desktop is completely loaded.
All told it probably takes me about a full minute and a half.
Which isn’t bad– I’ve seen people with faster machines get slower boots.
But this is after I’ve tricked it out as much as I can and I’m more or less against the wall here… What else can I be doing to improve this situation? Perhaps check on a faster RPM hard disk?
Or are you using Microsoft Bootvis? I’ve been staying away from that app ever since I had it consistently eating my Windows install. I know it was that app because I could restore from image and go along merrily as you please, but the moment I tried to use that program it killed my system every time. Something about service pack two I think because I never had this problem in service pack one.
–bornagainpenguin
Out of curiosity, what type of wireless card is it?
On the same box that I ran windows xp pro, I find shutdown in vista is probably 1/3 faster, and startup is about the same.
For Nappy Headed Ho’s! Just ask IMUS…
can we get this racist retard banned please ?
My laptop is an Alienware Area-51 M7700 3.6GHz with 2GB of RAM. Not every boot, but probably somewhere between 12.5%-25% of the time it takes 5 minutse to boot up. The computer hits a blank screen just pauses, no disc activity or anything, and just waits. Then continues booting normally.
It is so bad and so long I initially thought the computer was locking up or freezing and was powering it down and back up; after awhile of just waiting and trying to figure out what is going on I realized it’s not really locking up.
There is nothing in the event viewer, and nothing wrong with the system once it boots up; to the contrary it runs very well; but the boot behavior is a complete mystery to me…..
Have you tried running a manual forced disk check? It might have random corrupted bits… I know XP can have that problem if the cache has a bad file, it sits and tries to read it over and over and over… waiting longer and longer between each attempt.
cmd.exe
chkdsk /f c:
yes
yes
exit
RESTART
generally takes care of the problem?
Probably the same thing that happened to WinFS and a lot of other features that were “promised”.
Pre-announcing products is great and all (Apple’s style of being so secretive is kind of annoying I think), but don’t announce something unless you plan on actually shipping it.
Longhorn Promo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9ifQvQCO7Y
Then Microsoft decided to scrap all the work they put into that and gave us “Allow, Deny?”
–bornagainpenguin (who at one time really was a Microsoft fan..)
Wow, I didn’t see the boot sequence in the promo …. it was probably so fast and then being sped up it just didn’t have time to appear in the promo.
The marketing people really didn’t take bill hicks’ advice, they should. They also decided to provide us with that wealth of info that vista displays when vista boots.
Hehe, bored faces watching blank screens booting and people resetting alienwares, what a testament to an OS.
dmesg everytime please. much more interesting, informative and respectful of the user.
Vista seems to take an eternity to do damn near everything if you ask me. I’ve been using it now since it was officially released (at work), and I’ve become pretty used to that spinning circle. And this is on a 3Ghz dual-core with 2Gb RAM.
Explorer seems to be the prime suspect. It crashes if you look at it quickly and it takes an eternity to just display folder contents if there are more than say 50 images in the folder, and file copies are abysmal!
I sometimes wonder whether Microsoft ever actually fixes these problems, or whether hardware just gets faster and they seem to go away. Either way, can’t wait for that Service Pack …
My boot times are not spectacular on my Vista laptop and desktop. They are certainly slower than my past experience with XP would dictate, but I typically strive to avoid the reboot.
One issue I have on my laptop is that resume from standby can sometimes take upwards of 2-3 minutes. This is maybe 10% of the time, the rest of the time it’s merely sluggish. It’s so bad that I think the damned thing has crashed – but no, it’s just Vista doing something or other. During the whole thing the HD is trashing like crazy. This on a Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM. Insane.
*waiting impatiently for SP1*
Vista will start to boot in 2-3 minutes if you have shares mounted as drives, when the drives are offline. If no mounted volumes are there then vista will take 30 seconds.
This bad performance was inherited from previous NT versions.
Vista will start to boot in 2-3 minutes if you have shares mounted as drives, when the drives are offline. If no mounted volumes are there then vista will take 30 seconds.
This bad performance was inherited from previous NT versions.
That was supposed to be fixed in Vista. I haven’t tested it yet myself but as far as I know this issue was reportedly fixed by Microsoft in Vista, that’s what they claim at least.
I was looking for a link and found out that if the drives being shared are on an XP machine you will still have this problem. Both client and server need to be Vista in order to avoid this problem.
That would be the sensible thing to do. Or make hibernate the default shutdown (rather than a hidden option that isn’t visible unless you hold down Shift).
The issue at play, like the fiasco with the “Vista Capable” is in the details – what is consider ‘capable’ and what is considered ‘boot’, and does it include the utilisation of new features such as ready boot? The issue at play isn’t the operating system itself but the marketing of it.
Those who market Windows need to take responsibility for the claims they make. If it takes ‘50% less time to boot’, then they should mention in what circumstances; how did they come to that conclusion? on what hardware did they test it? from what state to what state is it based on?
Same goes for the capable argument; define what is capable and what one should expect from a machine that is capable – no use throwing around openended statements with no parametres in which to actually understand them in.
Fast boot ? You are lucky if it boot up.
There’s a lot of moaning on here about slow boot speeds and slow resumes. Ignoring those who don’t use Vista and just wish to badmouth it, I think everyone should be interested in trying to fix their problems. If you want to say it’s bad, please do some investigation into why that’s so. We are on OSNews, after all. If you’re not interested in the technical workings of an OS, why are you reading this site?
If you take the time to look at it, Windows is actually quite debuggable and diagnosable. The diagnostics have improved markedly in vista, as well.
Here’s what you do to investigate a slow bootup or resume:
*Open Event Viewer
*Navigate to Applications and Services/Microsoft/Windows/Diagnostics-Performance
*open the Operational log and right-click on the column headings to add the Correlation ID column to the event log.
*refresh and then right click on the corr. id column to group by it.
*Look at the individual entries which will tell you what was slow on a particular bootup.
*Disable the devices unless they’re necessary
I’d really appreciate it if some people who are running Vista and have problems with this sort of issue would post details about what entries if any appear in this log. That way we can all know what hardware/software is bad. I’ve personally had no problems with my TabletPC, but other hardware might be worth avoiding.
Ah – wonderful. I followed your directions and found the following were responsible for degrading my boot performance:
– Windows Audio Service.
– Explorer
– IDE Channel
– Background Prefetch
– Machine Policy Application
– USB Root Hub
– PreShellInit
None of which are really disable-able.
I did find out that my boots regularly take 60-180 seconds. Worse than I had thought. In fact, it appears that every boot results in an error entry in this log.
I am not trying to bash Vista here. I like Vista a lot, but there really seems to be no consistent pattern to these performance issues. I think it’s a more pervasive issue that will hopefully be addressed soon.
Is your hard drive in DMA mode? (It’s in the Advanced Properties of your IDE channel in Device Manager).
What’s your soundcard… which drivers are you using?
Yes, everything is properly configured with the hard drives, and the sound card is the built in SoundMax that comes with my Lenovo laptop – nothing special, and the drivers are certified.
It just occurred to me. Are you on a Domain? That can slow lots of things down significantly because Windows queries the network for security policy decisions, which it wouldn’t do for a non-domain machine.
Similarly, Network Mounts may take time to resolve. Do you have either of these cases?
In my same MacbookPro with 2GB RAM, Vista takes considerably longer to boot in the “same” virtual machine.
Vista feels a lot slower and it seems to thrash the HDD all the time, whereas WinXP performs fine.
I am not Bashing Vista, I know that there are hundreds of “not optimized” things in Paralells for Vista, but overall, using the same “virtual hardware” it runs much much slower. I use Visual Studio.NET inside XP and I work on a daily basis. (.NET 1.1/VS2003). My VIsta Business Edition (I am an MS-Partner so I have a Licence), is not yet “usable” to the point where XP is. (In Paralells, that is).
I presume that if I tweak Vista the way I used to tweak XP (services, stuff, etc.) I might be able to use it, but so far, I’d rather wait for optimizations on MAc/Parallels’ side.
I allocate 700~ Mb to XP and have done the same to Vista; after some initial testing I raised vista to 1024Mb to no avail. It trashed the HDD.
It is worth to mention that OS X has “no other running stuff” at the same time when running Vista.
I like Vista, but it uses way more hardware than XP. I am an ISV (independant software vendor) and I can easily see the difference in terms of speed and I am not alone in the company.
Everything seems to take a little bit more in VIsta. Some things are speeded up by using Multi-Threading so the Interfase gets nicely drawn by the Aero engine, but you can tell that in the back the “real work” is being done (e.g.: copying and moving stuff, using the ‘finder’ –ahem– explorer, etc..)
OTOH, the network browser has been greatly improved and that alone makes it worth! it’s so lame in XP to browse a Windows network! (even with WINS sometimes it’s sooo stupid and you get the Sand Clock all the time).
THat is my personal impression after a few days of “attempting a switch”. I am pretty sure that if you have a powerful machine with 2+GB of ram, Vista experience will be much more interesting than XP. If anything, for the sake of some new interesting stuff not present in XP. The start menu is nice and easy to use now, I like it more than the dock
Anyways, new computers are coming with Vista so we’ll have to evolve and get used to it. MS will push it hard and we all know what MS can do to push an OS to the market.
Love Vista, as you’ll have to live with it (if you don’t want to use it, at least you’ll have to fix your mom’s new box)
ADVERTISING
In the mean time, get a Mac, but some creative (no pun intented) software and create something cool for the world
/ADVERTISING
😉
Edited 2007-04-12 08:02
On my very old PC with 768MB RAM, the Windows Vista boot time is faster than XP. And after the login, the desktop is ready and quickly responsive.
The hard drive doesn’t work a lot like in XP; In Windows XP the boot process was caothic with hard drive trashing, instead in Windows Vista it seems well ordered and without hard drive trashing.
I only use the Windows Vista built-in drivers and everything works fine.
If on my very old machine, Windows Vista is very fast, I can’t believe that on all other or newer machines it’s not fast.
So, if your Vista is slow the only possibilities are:
1. there’s something wrong inyour Windows Vista installation
2. you’re not using the final Vista version, released on 30 January in stores
3. you’ve installed incompatibility drivers or bad applications (an incompatible antivirus, etc.)
4. you’ve disabled some important services which are necessary
5. you lie or you’re linux/mac fanboys or trolls which have never tried Windows Vista really.
Edited 2007-04-12 09:17
Actually, none of those apply to me, and my boot times pick a random number between 1 and 3 minutes.