Windows 8 To Boot Considerably Faster Than Windows 7

Microsoft just announced that the upcoming Windows 8 operating system will boot considerably faster than the Windows 7 operating system. Improvements were made after analyzing the power transitions of Windows 7 laptop and desktop users. Microsoft found out that 45% of all laptop users and 57% of all desktop users running Windows 7 were shutting down the operating system instead of putting it to sleep or into hibernation.

That’s a significant number, considering that cold booting or restarting the operating system takes longer than resuming the computer from sleep or hibernation.

In Windows 8, Microsoft will introduce a new concept called fast startup which improves boot times for the majority of users in the 30% to 70% range.

We need to look at a standard shutdown for a moment. When the system shuts down, everything is unloaded, which also means that it needs to be loaded the next time the computer starts. And yes, even if it restarts.

Windows 8 now hibernates the Kernel session instead of unloading it. Hibernation for those of you who do not know means that the session will be saved to the computer’s hard drive. On the next startup of the system, those information can be loaded faster which attributes to the speed up of the boot process.

But it is not only this that speeds up the Windows 8 boot process. Microsoft in addition added multi-phase resume capabilities to the operating system so that all cpu cores on multi-core systems are used in parallel to read the hiberfile and decompress the contents.

Here is a demonstration video by Microsoft that demonstrates the new Windows 8 boot process.

A possible downside to using Hibernation is the fact that it uses disk space which may not be a problem on most systems. If you are operating a fast SSD (solid state drive) on the other hand you may want to know that the new fast booting technology requires between 10% to 15% of the system’s physical RAM as space on the hard drive to save the hibernation files.

You can read up on the new technology at the Building Windows 8 blog.

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