Video: Windows 8 operating system boasts 8-second boot time
by Steven Mostyn - Sep 9 2011, 12:17
This certainly is quick. Image: Microsoft.
Although Windows 7 has gone some way to repairing Microsoft’s bruised reputation after the debacle that was Vista, the American software giant is still working hard to curry favour with its customers.
Case in point, the folk over at Redmond have released an interesting little video clip that showcases the rather impressive 8-second “fast startup” hibernation hybrid mode attributed to the upcoming Windows 8 operating system.
“The key thing to remember… is that in a traditional shutdown, we close all of the user sessions, and in the kernel session we close services and devices to prepare for a complete shutdown,” outlines Gabe Aul, director of program management at Microsoft.
“Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it,” he adds. “Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk.”
According to Microsoft, the 8-second boot time is made possible by saving the system state and memory contents to a file on disk (hiberfil.sys) and then reading that back in and restoring contents to memory when the user returns.
The video doesn’t reveal the format of the demo computer’s data drive, but Microsoft has said both HDD and SSD hardware will experience a boot boost of around 30-70 percent—although SSD users will likely be accessing their desktops a little quicker due to the lack of moving parts.
The computer used in the video is a HP EliteBook 8640p, which runs on the muscular Intel Core i7 (2620M), boasts 8GBs of RAM and is equipped with a 160GB solid-state drive. Chances are such specs contributed to the swift boot shown below.
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