Do you Know How Much Time your PC Takes to Boot up?

New laptops that boot up in 30 seconds not for you? You prefer it to be ready in about a second right? Is it possible? of course! It is exactly for this reason that computer manufacturers have introduced several approaches to speeding your machine's boot-time.

Computer manufacturers are now presenting laptops that are able to boot faster than ever. They have sped up boot times by equipping some Windows machines with a separate subsystem, with its own central processing unit. The point is that when you turn on the machine, Windows is avoided and a mini-operating system is loaded instead, along with a fixed set of applications that encompass a Web browser and a few other software odds and ends.

Counting seconds has become a normal occurrence. Computer users are not satisfied with boot times, because the process usually takes 45 to 60 seconds. This indicates a significant shift in computing as people now use their laptops more often, to surf the net and for shorter intervals.

Consumers today can find various new technologies on the market like smartphones which give you access to e-mail and the Web or netbooks. The latter do the same, but having bigger displays and keyboards than the phones. At least, netbooks are lightweight and inexpensive.

If you want to quickly bring your laptop to life, you should summon it not from a cold state, nor from deep hibernation (suspend-to-disk), but from standby mode (suspend-to-RAM), in which the last session is kept in memory. However, network connections will be lost and the data in the memory drains the battery.

Another computer manufacturer, Asus, to achieve faster boot times, equips its Windows machines with Express Gate, a subsystem which boots up in as few as eight seconds, depending on the speed of the processor and hard drive. But a test drive showed that, in Express Gate mode, it took only eight seconds to boot up. When checking e-mails, it took 43 seconds before the browser loaded.

Arjan van de Ven and Auke Kok, engineers at the Intel Open Source Technology Center chose another way and created versions of Linux that boot up in only five seconds, instead of the normal required 45 seconds. They presented their feat at the Linux Plumbers Conference in September with an Asus Eee PC 901, equipped with a solid-state drive, that helps, but a slow Atom C.P.U., that does not.

Mr. van de Ven has since used the same techniques to reduce the boot time to only three seconds on laptops with much faster Core 2 Duo C.P.U.'s. But, the time necessary to connect to the network and load a browser was not still not included.

One more approach by Dell will be ready for release by year-end. It will take 40 to 45 seconds to get its special non-Windows subsystem up and running. Dell, however, doesn't suggest this if compared to an inexpensive netbook. Latitude On will be packaged as one feature on a completely loaded notebook marketed to corporate executives. These models will cost about $1,999. But the worst thing is that its intended customers, corporate I.T. departments, have directed Dell to require a password from a user every time the machine returns to full power.

Resources:
PC booting up in 30 seconds
You deserve faster boot-up
PC problems at startup?