Phoenix Instant Boot
Computer boot time is a concern to many but not all users. Some do not seem to care if a computer boots up for a minute or more while others leave their computers on to avoid having to boot it again at a later point in time.
I like to power on the computer in the morning for instance, and then go and make a coffee while the computer boots. Your experience may vary, as several factors play a role in the time it takes to boot a computer system.
One of the things that is extending the boot time of modern computer systems is the computer bios.
It can take up to ten seconds for the Bios to load hardware devices (like hard drives, computer memory or disk drives) before the operating system can start loading the files needed to boot the operating system.
Phoenix has developed a new technology that they call Phoenix Instant Boot. The new technology cuts down the time it takes for the Bios to initialize everything to one second. It is based on UEFI, the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, which Intel developed back in 2005.
The improvement in boot time is achieved by loading devices and processes that are needed to load the operating system simultaneously. Take a look at the following video that has been posted to YouTube that showcases the boot time.
The notebook used in the demonstration video was powered by a high-performance solid state disk. It took about ten seconds to boot into Windows 7. Phoenix picked a fast device for the demonstration but improved boot performance may be experienced on slower devices as well.
While boot time is not the only thing that counts, it is nice to see some progress in the area. It is even possible, according to Phoenix, that some hardware manufacturers will offer Bios upgrades that incorporate the technology.
The demo is meaningless!
Sure, on a system that is ONLY running a clean Windows variant, boot time will always be fairly quick. The real problem isn’t with the BIOS but with Windows itself.
In a real world system with a network, services, firewall, AV, user applications, etc., the boot time that includes loading and initializing everything will always be much longer than on a clean system.
On my WinXP system, it can take me 10-12 minutes to boot up and get all my applications up and running (about 80 processes), ready for me to begin work. Which is why I never turn my system off.
I’d like to see them put my system on that machine with their rocket BIOS and see how much quicker they can boot.
I’d say about 9 seconds faster, probably more depending on the speed of your hard drive and the SSD that they used.
In the overall scheme of things individual application’s (say Firefox or more advanced apps like CAD software, 3d modeling, photoshop, etc.) performance is more important in my opinion. But advances in boot times are great as well.
presto! linux can get to browser page about as fast
after the trial ends, the program will auto shut down in 10minutes
this is still useful to leave on system for quick internet/email/ check before
bedtime (as this limits internet addiction/ sleep loss)