This would totally be ground breaking. It is being reported that Microsoft is promising ultra-fast boot times of around 8 secs from powered off to booted in Windows 8! A video was released yesterday showing how quickly the new OS will start up in its new “fast start-up mode”. A Microsoft employee shows a battery removed from a laptop before placing it in and giving a demo of the fast boot.
Microsoft also released some data that showed that most Windows 7 machines are shut down completely to save power to for a fresh start of the machine. Microsoft argues that hibernation might be a better option for quick restarts in Windows 7, Microsoft has been working hard to drastically improve boot from cold in Windows 8. Microsoft does this by closing the user session but the OS in Windows 8 hibernates the kernel. As the session hibernation data is much smaller, it takes substantially less time to write to disk.
Microsoft says that the new fast start up mode will benefit all systems, whether fitted with a spinning hard drive or SSD. But systems such as tablets, typically fitted with SSDs, will boot up the full Windows 8 OS in around the 8 sec mark. This will be particularly important if Windows 8, on ARM for example, is going to challenge Apple’s fast-boot iPad with its instant-on capability. The new OS also retains the ability to completely close off the kernel too, which can be achieved by using Restart.
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