Every now and again I have to remind myself that my computer started up faster when it only had eight bits to work with. Yes, I know, it didn’t do as much as the one I own now, but still. … 🙄
Every now and again I have to remind myself that my computer started up faster when it only had eight bits to work with. Yes, I know, it didn’t do as much as the one I own now, but still. … 🙄
It may be possible again one day : Mach Boot is a totally useless but blazing fast live-cd, which boots in less than 20 secs on old machines.
It’s nice to see that some companies are working on new BIOSes, which can utilize a hell of a lot more memory during boot. It’s painful to think about the fact that we’re still using a 20 year old “os” during the boot.
For me, the BIOS-boot probably takes about half the boot time.
Total time from pressing the power button to the fully loaded desktop on my system : 1min 7 sec
– Bios/POST screen : 17 sec
– grub loading : 4 sec
– actual ubuntu boot time : 23 sec
– gnome loading the desktop until it’s fully usable : another 23sec
Conclusion :
with a lighter desktop environnment and an optimized BIOS, we could easily obtain a 50% speed boost.
On another note, there is an interesting piece of software, named Splashtop http://www.splashtop.com/index.php
which proves us that instant-on is possible. Unfortunately, it’s only installed on Asus high-end motherboards.
I got similarly impressive stats from older hardware with MachBoot. I’ll have to check out that splashtop site; it would almost be worth getting one of those motherboards just for that feature. I wonder if they do laptops yet. Hmm. …