Microsoft to improve boot performance in Windows 7, manages to boot in under 15 seconds “in the lab”

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Windows Vista SP1 data indicates that roughly 35% of systems boot in 30 seconds or less, and 75% of systems boot in 50 seconds or less.

With the introduction of Sleep mode, many of us should not have to worry about Boot Performance. But there are still many of us who would prefer to shut down a computer rather than have it in sleep mode. According to the Engineering Windows 7 weblog, they’ve managed to achieve a boot time of�only 15 seconds�”in the lab. We’re not quite sure what that is, but if they can produce something close to that in the actual product, that would definitely be good news.

According to an analysis conducted by Ed Bott, 75% of computers with Vista SP1 installed boot up in 50 seconds or less, and 35% of those boot up in 30 seconds or less. Clearly lots of work still needs to be done to reduce the boot time.

Part of the major improvements to be made are to decrease the number of auto-start services to occur:

As an example Windows 7 effort, we are working very hard on system services. We aim to dramatically reduce them in number, as well as reduce their CPU, disk and memory demands. Our perspective on this is simple; if a service is not absolutely required, it shouldn�t be starting and a trigger should exist to handle rare conditions so that the service operates only then.

To summarize what they’ll do to improve boot performance, they’ll:

• Reduce the number of system services and their demands on hardware at startup
• Reduce the number of autostart services
• Considering the removal of prefetching since it may not be needed on Solid State Disks (SSD)
• “Aim to quickly identify specific issues on individual systems, and provide help to assist in resolving the issues…” Probably have some sort of feature that alerts the user what is causing slow start-up time. They’re not very clear on this.
• Work on informing Windows 7 customers about “poor-performing” software that can affect this

What do you guys think need to be done to improve boot time?�

[Source:�Engineering Windows 7]

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