Sunday, October 26, 2008

In a New Age of Impatience, Cutting PC Start Time - NYTimes.com

Hopefully Windows 7 will have a more elegant way to achieve reduced start-up time, compared with the approaches outlined later in the article; I suspect we’ll find out at PDC 2008 tomorrow

Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Lenovo are rolling out machines that give people access to basic functions like e-mail and a Web browser in 30 seconds or less. Asus, a Taiwanese company that is the world’s largest maker of the circuit boards at the center of every PC, has begun building faster-booting software into its entire product line.

Even Microsoft, whose bloated Windows software is often blamed for sluggish start times, has pledged to do its part in the next version of the operating system, saying on a company blog that “a very good system is one that boots in under 15 seconds.” Today only 35 percent of machines running the latest version of Windows, called Vista, boot in 30 seconds or less, the blog notes. (Apple Macintoshes tend to boot more quickly than comparable Windows machines but still feel glacially slow to most users.)

In a New Age of Impatience, Cutting PC Start Time - NYTimes.com

2 comments:

AmyGeek said...

One of the things that makes me crazy is that start time is significantly increased due to the crap that PC manufacturers install. If you do a clean Windows install on a new machine, the machine speeds up significantly right off the bat. Of course, every time you install new software, it sets some part of itself to load at startup, which slows the darned thing down again. Civilians totally don't get this & install all kinds of toolbars & crap from the web and it becomes a nightmare.

(Not that Windows can't use improving too!)

AmyGeek said...

speaking of new toolbars - check out chunk it. I installed it yesterday and am really impressed. :-)