For the past 20 years or so, I’ve just assumed that Windows had to do a bunch of housekeeping chores before it was ready to work. So after you turn the computer on, you gotta wait for an irritating minute or two. (and I think in the original version of Windows (called 3.1 ?) on a pre-Pentium era computer,it took a full 3 or 4 minutes)
But gee whiz, Windows 10 starts up fast…Like turning on a light bulb. Very convenient!
What’s the reason? New technology? Better use of existing tech?
Fast Startup. It’s basically like the old “hibernate” mode that nobody ever used. Also, if you have a solid state drive, that will help in and of itself.
I’d say it wasn’t really a priority for them until they wanted Windows to compete in the tablet market. People don’t reboot desktops very often; startup becomes more of an issue with a laptop, but a minute or so isn’t a deal breaker in the grand scheme of things. But they needed Windows 8 to turn on as fast as an iPad.
Some of it is just better design. For older versions of Windows, they were running a load of checks on stuff that hardly ever changes, every time the machine was powered up - not necessary if you’re keeping proper track of changes (which admittedly is easier when you have a proper user/administrator permissions model)
And in some precious versions, “the entire OS” also included all of the Microsoft-branded applications on the computer. That’s part of how Word beat out Word Perfect, for instance: People noticed that Word loaded faster than Word Perfect did, because most of the loading of Word actually happened at bootup (which meant that a Word Perfect user was effectively having to wait for both to start up).
I don’t know for a fact, but I strongly suspect it is so. I do know for a fact, that the way that Microsoft made Windows SEVEN appear to boot faster, was simply to have the desktop display sooner than it usually does. It actually took just as long as always for Windows to get completely up, but by showing you the green hillsides of Naboo reallly fast, it APPEARED to boot faster.
The main reason Windows has always booted slowly in the past, has been due to it’s basic structure. Instead of Windows being really “complete,” it has always been made of components, some of which were used in more than one application. That meant that when you booted to Windows, it didn’t just start, it actually had to BUILD ITSELF from parts, every time.
I don’t know if they have gotten away from that. If they ever made the Operating System into a rigid structure, they would accomplish two things: make it possible to load it as FIRMWARE, and boot instantly, plus make it impervious to viruses and malware, since the operating system itself wouldn’t have to be changed or manipulated by the applications software.
But since no one has done that, I suspect there’s no way for it to BE done, practically.
When I used Windows 10, it actually booted a lot slower–though I did an upgrade, not a fresh install. I was using the hard drive that came with the computer, not SSD.
While the above statements about fast-startup optimization are true – I think serious efforts at improving boot performance began with Vista – don’t overlook the performance of modern computers as an important factor.
As a reference point, I have one fast computer easily capable of running any modern OS on which I chose to install Windows XP some years ago. I recently decided to add an SSD and install Windows 7 on that while keeping XP, and the BIOS can select either the SSD or one of the HDDs as the boot drive, and I can directly compare the two OS boot times. Windows 7 definitely boots faster than XP due to the optimizations and the SSD, but the fact is, either one boots up within a few seconds so it hardly matters. If I didn’t have this computer, I’d probably say that XP takes forever to boot, but that’s only because the only other computer I have running XP is an old clunker!