Change to Bios will make for PCs that boot in seconds

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11430069

by soitgoes • 16 years ago

63 62 16 years ago

bbc.co.uk

lefstathiou• 16 years ago

I cant tell you how many years I've been hearing this. Wasnt Vista supposed to be almost instant?

epochwolf4• 16 years ago

The only thing I've found to be "almost instant" is waking up my mac from sleep mode.

sspencer• 16 years ago

This and the battery performance while sleeping are, in my opinion, some of the main attractions of macs today.

sprout2• 16 years ago

I've got a Dell Vostro 1510 w/ Vista sitting in front of me, and coming out of sleep is "almost instant."

mrshoe• 16 years ago

Pressing the home button on an iPad?

baddox2• 16 years ago

Waking my Windows 7 desktop from sleep is almost instant. It takes longer for my LCD monitors' backlights to flick on than for the login screen to appear.

chadgeidel• 16 years ago

Vista (and Windows 7) boot from "hybrid sleep" in less time than it takes my monitor to turn on.

Power draw in "hybrid sleep" is negligible (less than the idle power draw of my 2 LCD monitors in sleep mode).

MichaelGG• 16 years ago

I thought "hybrid sleep" just meant that the machine is in sleep, but it can also transition to hibernation if your battery runs low.

saturdayplace• 16 years ago

> Some PC and laptop makers are already using UEFI

Who? I'd be a lot less skeptical about widespread use, if I knew a Dell or an HP were on board with this.

epochwolf4• 16 years ago

Doesn't apple use this already? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface

jasonkeene• 16 years ago

Yeah, Apple has used EFI for quite a while. My laptop still doesn't boot that fast.

jfb2• 16 years ago

I particularly like the floppy disk clip art.

listic4• 16 years ago

Well, BIOS is floppy disk's peer (same age), and it contains code for accessing floppy drive, and in many cases is most easily updated via floppy disk; so this part makes sense.

Though today if one is using floppy disk at all, it will most likely be a 3.5" 1.44 MB High Density version, which is much younger than original model that is BIOS peer (maybe it would be more exact to show older 5.25" floppy?) But in general, they belong to the same age.

cryptoz• 16 years ago

Off topic, but the Microsoft Office 2010 Save icon is still a floppy disk. Crazy.

http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/ukschools/WindowsLiveWriter/...

frou_dh4• 16 years ago

Macs use EFI, don't they? My MBP cold boots fairly quickly, but nothing to write home about.

modoc2• 16 years ago

Throw in a fast SSD and it will blow your socks off!

frou_dh4• 16 years ago

I'll buy a SSD the day a good 512GB one costs less than a month's rent :-)

jodrellblank• 16 years ago

Customer's new laptop, a Toshiba with a Core i7, 3GB RAM (i.e. the new kind of qpath thing), manufacturer shipped SSD.

Running XP, being installed in the middle of Windows Update and prompting for permission, so basically 4 cores, 3 GB, SSD, clean system, idle.

I clicked Outlook. 5 seconds to get tot the startup wizard screen.

I could hardly be more underwhelmed after all the SSD hype I've read. I've seen faster cheap office desktop computers.

noonespecial• 16 years ago

The good part is holding the option key and getting a reasonable environment to choose a startup disk.

My mac is the only computer I've ever had that can boot off a clone of my internal disk stored on a USB extrenal disk. This has saved my ass more than once.

"Target disk mode" is also reasonably awesome.

sudont2• 16 years ago

Back when I did TA tech teaching there were many, many student movie projects saved due to target disk mode. Too bad that FireWire is depreciated in favor of USB.

walkon• 16 years ago

Booting to a USB drive is something any decent bios has been able to do for the past 5+ years.

teilo2• 16 years ago

Even current macs use EFI 1.1. UEFI 2.3 is the current version of the standard, and as yet no macs are even using 2.0 to my knowledge.

That said, there is a huge difference between any version of EFI and BIOS boot times. But keep in mind, we are not talking about the time to boot the OS, but the time it takes for the OS to start booting. Think all the time wasted in your typical BIOS-based boot on hardware checks, post screens, etc.

biturd• 16 years ago

What are the changes in these newer versions of EFI? 1.1 to 2.3 is huge, what are we missing?

cskau• 16 years ago

Anyone got some kind of listing of machines using UEFI already ? I checked Wikipedia, but it's quite scarce on concrete info.

aliguori• 16 years ago

All recent IBM x86 servers use UEFI.

frankc• 16 years ago

Solid state drives can boost boot time quite a bit, and there are plenty of metrics online to prove it. I suppose a bios upgrade could improve the time it takes to go from POST to the intial OS bootstrapping, but once you get to the OS loading, I don't see where the bios can make a difference? The OS load time seems to be the biggest bottleneck to me, which is where the solid state fast access times get their big wins.

bryanlarsen• 16 years ago

My Ubuntu boots in 5 seconds off an SSD, but the BIOS takes 15 seconds.

listic4• 16 years ago

Of course, we are talking about the time before the OS loading.

The fact that it takes seconds to probe and initialize the hardware is totally unnecessary (see my other comment).

russell• 16 years ago

Reminds me of a Science Fiction novel I read, where one of the characters was a starship based super-AI. At the bottom-most layer of software was an emulation of MS-DOS. In software, in the name of backwards-compatibility, our worse mistakes (almost) never die .

thwarted• 16 years ago

You must dig up the title to this book!

pjscott• 16 years ago

One of the more disturbing things in Portal is that GLaDOS stands for "Genetic Life-form and Disk Operating System." The whole plot of the game revolves around a malevolent and extremely advanced form of DOS.

prodigal_erik• 16 years ago

Also reminds me of the "Programmer-Archaeologist" career Vinge described. And that humans' software had long used a low-level clock which was thought to commemorate the first moon landing. (A fair guess, but the epoch chosen was actually in January 1970....)

listic4• 16 years ago

The fact that it takes seconds to probe and initialize the hardware is totally unnecessary, because any modern OS worth its salt ('BSD, Linux, Mac OS, Windows) will probably do it itself. It is still so because PC hardware manufacturers prefer to retain status quo and not fix what is not broken. This is so with many other things in PC architecture, as well. I.e. take the ATX power connections: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATX. We could be using just one voltage (+12V or other) going to the motherboard long ago. It would simplify electrical design, thereby improving efficiency, thereby simplifying cooling and lowering noise; and lowering costs in the process. But the manufacturers are content with the status quo. If nothing else, the hint that it is the right thing to do is that Google does it: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html, search for "Gigabyte".

atuladhar• 16 years ago

Really sorry to nitpick, but this one irks me to no end.

i.e., from Latin id est, means "that is" or "namely." e.g., from Latin exempli gratia, means "for example."

listic4• 16 years ago

thanks for education! I thought i.e is "in example"

bengl3rt• 16 years ago

My friend's desktop computer is halfway through bringing up Win 7 before the monitor even warms up... then again he boots off a PCI SSD.

teilo2• 16 years ago

Caveat Lector. Misleading title. This is not talking about OS boot speeds. This is is talking about the time from flipping the switch until the OS begins to load.

corysama• 16 years ago

I'm still excited by this. Since I installed an SSD boot drive, the bios startup time is half of my boot time.

peterbessman• 16 years ago

This is cool, though I think it might be late to the party. Doesn't everyone just suspend/resume these days? Not that it's zero value, but it would have been really noteworthy 5-10 years ago.

aphexairlines• 16 years ago

UEFI demo on a thinkpad t400: http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=560

Change to Bios will make for PCs that boot in seconds

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