How’s this for fast? Windows 8 boots in as little as 8 seconds due to a new fast startup mode that Microsoft introduced and first demoed today. Check out the video embedded below for the demonstration of Windows 8’s amazing start-up time. Any faster and it would be instantaneous.
And in case you were wondering, that’s 8 seconds from the moment the user hits the power button on a device that’s been completely turned off.
Windows 8 boot on steroids is the result of start-up optimizations which involve “upgrading” cold start-up with additional features of a power-saving state designed to put some components of the OS on the hard drive.
“Our solution is a new fast startup mode which is a hybrid of traditional cold boot and resuming from hibernate,” revealed Gabe Aul, a director of program management in Windows.
This means that when customers will shut down Windows 8 machines, the operating system won’t close all user sessions as well as the services and devices in the kernel session.
“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. 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,” Aul added.
With Windows 7, the software giant overhauled the way that the platform was handling drivers, and boot times improved significantly.
Of course, not to the impressive level of Windows 8 boot performance, but still. I should stress that the Redmond company has once again revamped the mechanism that allows the operating system to load drivers for Windows 8.
“Another important thing to note about Windows 8’s fast startup mode is that, while we don’t do a full “Plug & Play” enumeration of all drivers, we still do initialize drivers in this mode,” Aul explained.
“Those of you who like to cold boot in order to “freshen up” drivers and devices will be glad to know that is still effective in this new mode, even if not an identical process to a cold boot.”
It appears I was right on the money, and I still believe that Windows 8 systems could boot in 6 seconds or less on machines equipped with SSDs and Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI).
“This new fast startup mode will yield benefits on almost all systems, whether they have a spinning HDD or a solid state drive (SSD), but for newer systems with fast SSDs it is downright amazing. Check out the video below to see for yourself,” Aul said.
UPDATE: This is the computer used in the video: EliteBook 8640p (Intel Core i7-2620M, 8GB, 160GB SSD).
This isn't a true startup from zero. This is coming back from hibernation. There is no way that a zero point start up takes 8 seconds. It's bad form for them to promote this as a full startup.
Comment #9.1 by: Oo on 14 Sep 2011, 03:14 GMT
Lol. Before she even turned on the computer, she had the battery in her hand, to show people like you that it isn't a facade.
Comment #9.2 by: baffled on 14 Sep 2011, 03:16 GMT
Before the demonstration, she had the battery for the laptop in her hand; just for skeptics like you.
OK, this powerful Notebook has high performance hardwares, with nothing but just Operating System inside it, no background applications that start on boot but Microsoft's services, no antiviruses and other security tools or other production softwares. So it boots faster than ever. As we say before, it's just "Demonstration", not "Real". Trust me and believe it, so we would call Microsoft's Customers "Children". I more like using Unix base OSEs than Microsoft has.
Comment #12 by: Wak Rijal on 07 Oct 2011, 13:34 UTC
ya.. what i see is.. where is the boot logo? just skip to desktop? it's wake from hibernate.. if lappy go to hibernate, it doesn't matter if u take out battery or not use a battery it's still can go to desktop or where u left it..
Comment #13.1 by: Jer HB on 29 Feb 2012, 19:04 GMT
Perhaps if you read the article, you might have noticed that they indeed DID do a form of hibernation on the laptop -- they saved the kernel state in persistent storage, allowing for the faster boot time.
But nice attempt to move the goal posts.
Comment #14 by: DukeNukem on 25 Oct 2011, 16:46 UTC
How bout if you try it on a REAL computer? Not many of us can afford an i7 rig...try it on a regular Core2Duo and see if you'll have Win8 in 8 seconds :P
Comment #14.1 by: Ry on 27 Mar 2012, 00:51 GMT
The CPU doesn't account for as much performance of boot up as you might think. Have a fast and defragged/optimized HDD in there and there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to get something similar. Also remember Windows 8 isn't out till the end of the year you could have a Core i3 or i5 by then which will help.
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