Windows 8 Boots 55.26% Faster Than Windows 7

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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We have heard that the boot times would be phenomenal with Windows 8 and recent testing is bearing out the claim. Testing is being done on the unfinished version of Windows 8, but even in the incomplete state, W8 is showing W7 a few things about fast boot and several other important areas.

In short, what PC Magazine has tested partially confirms that Microsoft has made sufficiently large strides to take Windows to the tablet form factor.
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They make up for it with the extra time it takes to find the damn "Power Down" button.


I believe it is roughly 44.74% longer to shut down Win8 than Win7
 
I was going to make another anti-Windows 8 joke but I just feel sorry for it now. So with that said, it's nice to see this news atleast.
 
Fast startup is nice when you're carrying around a tablet and really would like to use it without waiting after you poke the power button, but it seems silly to base much in the way of decisions on whether or not something boots up quickly. Boot (later Maximum PC) magazine, when they were still popular, used to put computers on the stopwatch just to measure this and made a pretty big deal out of it. I never did understand why it was a significant consideration. If it takes forever, I'll just go find some snackies or a make a cup of tea.
 
I'm at a 13 second boot on Win7 Pro. Its usually to the main screen before I sit down, settle in and turn on both monitors.
 
I'd be curious to know more details about exactly what they are measuring.

My guess would be that they are using some sort of sleep/hibernate as default now, so that you are never really "booting".

On my Windows 7 systems right now most of the boot time comes from Bios ROM screens at the beginning, and loading my startup programs after I'm already on the desktop. The time that I spend actually "loading windows" is already 5 seconds or less. I'm just not seeing what else there is to improve on really.

In this "test" they show Windows 7 taking 38 seconds to boot up. No Windows 7 machine that I know of with an SSD takes that long unless there are 5 option rom screens at the beginning. Perhaps it's mechanical HDD loading time that they've somehow improved on?
 
so was that to it boot in to windows or till every thing was loaded and rady to go?
 
I have probably 20-30sec alone of my Sabertooth X79's bios derping around, really a bit of a bummer. Seriously, it takes like 5 seconds alone from pushing the power button and seeing ANYTHING on the screen. :rolleyes: I turned off any kind of delays in the BIOS, only have my boot drive to boot from at first, etc.

Don't know if this is UEFI's fault or what the deal is. I'll live, but motherboard makers need to get their stuff together too.
 
Of course it boots up faster, cause it has much less of a UI to load up. BTW, when Windows loads it's not really loaded. Just cause you can see the screen doesn't mean it's done. In Ubuntu when you see the desktop, you can go right ahead and start using it.
 
colinstu said:
I have probably 20-30sec alone of my Sabertooth X79's bios derping around, really a bit of a bummer. Seriously, it takes like 5 seconds alone from pushing the power button and seeing ANYTHING on the screen. :rolleyes: I turned off any kind of delays in the BIOS, only have my boot drive to boot from at first, etc.

Don't know if this is UEFI's fault or what the deal is. I'll live, but motherboard makers need to get their stuff together too.
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Yep same here, I don't know why they do this crap. There's no way bios level activities actually should take that long when it literally has the entire processor to itself with no HAL or any other overhead.

I find my bios takes longer than my OS. It's 30 seconds from the push of the power button to me being able to open a program on my Linux system. 20 of those seconds is the bios dicking around.

I think we've reached a point now where OSes load much faster than they did before, so now what needs tweaking is the bios. Eventually, we'll get instant on just like in the movies. :p
 
Microsoft screwed up on the way it described the speedup and [H] copied them, which is understandable. You will certainly wait less time for W8 to boot, but it's not about how much FASTER you boot it's how LONG it takes to boot. Saying that it's 55% faster or that it takes slight less than HALF as much time are the same thing, but which one do you think is a better headline and more relevant to the average user?
 
But I'm not complaining in the least about the actual accomplishment, hats off to Microsoft. W8 is going to feel like a tablet with how quickly it can turn on. I hope this same improvements translates into shutdowns reboots and sleep, too.
 
XacTactX said:
Microsoft screwed up on the way it described the speedup and [H] copied them, which is understandable. You will certainly wait less time for W8 to boot, but it's not about how much FASTER you boot it's how LONG it takes to boot. Saying that it's 55% faster or that it takes slight less than HALF as much time are the same thing, but which one do you think is a better headline and more relevant to the average user?
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Isn't that kinda..splitting hairs and maybe doesn't matter?
 
my windows currently takes 34 seconds to boot up :(

16 seconds for the bios, and 18 seconds for windows, disabling ati drivers shaves the windows boot to 10 seconds. makes me sad panda.
 
They have a whole marketing department and I'm just a community college student. I am splitting hairs but I still think Microsoft can do better than that.
 
Ocean said:
my windows currently takes 34 seconds to boot up :(

16 seconds for the bios, and 18 seconds for windows, disabling ati drivers shaves the windows boot to 10 seconds. makes me sad panda.
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Buy SSD
 
Ashbringer said:
Of course it boots up faster, cause it has much less of a UI to load up. BTW, when Windows loads it's not really loaded. Just cause you can see the screen doesn't mean it's done. In Ubuntu when you see the desktop, you can go right ahead and start using it.
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With Windows 8, when it's loaded you can start using it.

And with a SSD on a newer Lenovo laptop, I'm seeing extremely fast boot time. < 10 seconds from power on to Start screen. I'm very impressed by that. And yes, I can actually click on anything and have it load after the start screen loads. It's fast. It's not done, but the necessary stuff is loaded up and running just fine.
 
XacTactX said:
They have a whole marketing department and I'm just a community college student. I am splitting hairs but I still think Microsoft can do better than that.
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Microsoft made the claim of that there'd be less waiting, PCMag tested it, the article on [H] reposted it, and we got a repost of that. Microsoft is kinda distant from the whole 55.26% faster thing that you mentioned.
 
I am using consumer preview on one computer. What is most awesome is the fact it can boot up blazing fast even with a slow hard drive. That computer runs an old 250GB hard drive that was left over from a P4 era dell. I am very sure most of the waiting is for bios, so the next thing we need to see is motherboard makers working on speeding up bios.
 
Skripka said:
Or just hit "Sleep" rather than "Shut Down".
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The big advantage here is that shutting down is so fast sleep is not needed. That is what makes this cool. On top of that we are talking about a desktop OS.
 
My issues with these kinds of tests is that, how many people are there that install the OS and nothing else? Once you load all of your programs on to the computer the boot times can vary widely. I am more interested about the boot times after a month of use than the boot time of it after i just installed it.
 
To shutdown my consumer preview of win8 I just Alt+F4 and that brings me to the shutdown menu. I don't see anything that's faster than doing that...
 
I dont see how anything can be faster booting then my z77 with SSD rig .... so it's going to make it a smidge faster at best lol
 
Oh, and no matter what, it's going to be like 10000% times faster than the Playbook. WTF was RIM thinking in making a tablet OS that takes 10 minutes to load? And I'm not exagerating, it really does take a good 10-20 minutes to load that thing. I guess a tablet is meant to always be on and you just let it go in standby, but still. I would buy a win8 tablet before I would buy another playbook.
 
Red Squirrel said:
Oh, and no matter what, it's going to be like 10000% times faster than the Playbook. WTF was RIM thinking in making a tablet OS that takes 10 minutes to load? And I'm not exagerating, it really does take a good 10-20 minutes to load that thing. I guess a tablet is meant to always be on and you just let it go in standby, but still. I would buy a win8 tablet before I would buy another playbook.
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Ten to twenty minutes?! That's nuts, Mister Squirrel and I'm glad I never bought one.
 
Like someone else said, "Get an SSD." That will make it faster than Win 8.
 
BladeVenom said:
Like someone else said, "Get an SSD." That will make it faster than Win 8.
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Sure, a solid state drive will make Win7 faster than Win8 on a standard hard drive, but all that extra performance from Windows 8 will also apply nicely to the same solid state disk. In apples-to-apples terms, Windows 8 is largely faster given the same hardware so why not do both and get more of everything?
 
Red Squirrel said:
Oh, and no matter what, it's going to be like 10000% times faster than the Playbook. WTF was RIM thinking in making a tablet OS that takes 10 minutes to load? And I'm not exagerating, it really does take a good 10-20 minutes to load that thing. I guess a tablet is meant to always be on and you just let it go in standby, but still. I would buy a win8 tablet before I would buy another playbook.
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SkribbelKat said:
Ten to twenty minutes?! That's nuts, Mister Squirrel and I'm glad I never bought one.
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HP's WebOS took a long time to boot on their Touchpad's too. I never stop watched it though.
 
GotNoRice said:
I'd be curious to know more details about exactly what they are measuring.

My guess would be that they are using some sort of sleep/hibernate as default now, so that you are never really "booting".
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I'd be very surprised if they were talking hibernation recovery here...because these numbers are far too slow. Last time I hibernated it took me 2-3 seconds to get to a full-blown full Windows 7 desktop. It may be slightly irrational of me, but I like "off" to mean off, so I don't hibernate, and the only thing I let sleep is my monitor, when appropriate. And, I shut down when I won't be using the comp for some hours.

On my Windows 7 systems right now most of the boot time comes from Bios ROM screens at the beginning, and loading my startup programs after I'm already on the desktop. The time that I spend actually "loading windows" is already 5 seconds or less. I'm just not seeing what else there is to improve on really.
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Well, I recently installed an MSI 970a-G46 at home with UEFI, and from cold boot that thing tears through to the Windows loading screen in exactly 7 secs from cold power-on...;) That's way, way faster, at least 2x as fast, as the fastest of my old bios machines could get to that point.

Basically, these numbers seem way too slow to be hibernation as I can beat them easily in hibernation mode right now with Win7...;) (And that was with a bios, too, since as you note the hibernation doesn't reboot the bios.) Yea, with a streamlined, decent UEFI I can easily see ~20 secs for a Win8 cold boot.

What I am willing to bet on though, is that these are "clean" Win8 installations, which have yet to support umpteen installed programs. When that's the case, the total boot times will always increase, for any OS on earth...;)

In this "test" they show Windows 7 taking 38 seconds to boot up. No Windows 7 machine that I know of with an SSD takes that long unless there are 5 option rom screens at the beginning. Perhaps it's mechanical HDD loading time that they've somehow improved on?
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My windows machines don't use SSD's...;) I'll bet that even at this date, most still don't. I'll get around to buying one, I suppose, eventually--right now, it's just not a priority. I guess if you are a person who is going to use hibernation, then it's likely that a recovery from sleep without SSD's will be a good deal faster than a cold boot from SSD's. But like you, I think I'd rather go the SSD route than tinker with hibernation--the "nightmare" of most device drivers these days.
 
I am running an Asus x79 with UEFI Bios. I don't need a GPT partition, I use an MBR, 240 Gig SSD for C Drive.

I tried to install the last preview of Windows 8 and just as before it says I can't install on a MBR partition only on a GPT partition. So I wipe the C drive and make it a GPT. Wn8 starts the install, the files go on, but 30 min later it is still the black screen with the little spinny thing saying I am working on it. Totally trashed C drive had to go back to an MBR partition and reinstall Win7 from Acronis. POS UEFI Bios? I had it set for Legacy in the BIOS. Also tried UEFI compatible.

Not that I will change to Win8 I just wanted to see it up close. Happy, Happy Happy!
 
So is this "boot time" the time that your desktop pops up, or the time that it finally loads and allows you to do something useful.
 
rudy said:
The big advantage here is that shutting down is so fast sleep is not needed. That is what makes this cool. On top of that we are talking about a desktop OS.
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Agree, I'm old fashioned, still shut down my systems when not using them.
 
whiz187 said:
I had it set for Legacy in the BIOS. Also tried UEFI compatible.
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So did you end up getting Windows 8 working with GPT and Legacy disabled? Have you tested Windows 7 with the same settings?

On my Z77 board I had Windows 7 on Legacy and MBR, then changed to Legacy off and GPT after reading that Windows would load faster this way. Boy were they WRONG. Windows 7 now takes a noticeable amount of time more to load up than it did on MBR. I would go on to read that Windows 8 is the one that "might" boot up faster if used with Legacy off and under GPT.

Pfft, I have little intentions (now) of using Windows 8 so I guess it is back to MBR the next time I have to format. As a side note; my Windows Experience Index dropped .1 point off of my hard disk score while on GPT. :mad:
 
It may be faster to boot, but once you're in it's going to be 2-4x longer to do anything because of the way they reorganized things. If they don't put back the option to enable the Start Menu it's going to turn into Vista 2.0 and make Win7 the son of XP for longevity.
 
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