Microsoft this week touted the superfast boot times consumers can expect in Windows 8 devices, and showed off a demo video (below) of an HP laptop loading the upcoming OS in just a few seconds.
"No feature gets talked about and measured more" than boot time, Windows division president Steven Sinofsky said in a Thursday blog post. Windows 8 is designed so that fewer boots are required, but "when you do boot we want it to be as fast as possible," he said.
Gabe Aul, a director of program management in Windows, provided some more details about what the team is doing on that front. The three main goals, he said, are: effectively zero watt power draw when off; a fresh session after boot; and very fast times between pressing the power button and being able to use the PC.
Aul pointed to data that said 57 percent of desktop PC users and 45 percent of laptop owners shut down their machines instead of putting them to sleep. Half of all users, meanwhile, do the same.
"Our solution is a new fast startup mode which is a hybrid of traditional cold boot and resuming from hibernate," Aul wrote.
"In a traditional shutdown, we close all of the user sessions, and in the kernel session we close services and devices to prepare for a complete shutdown," Aul continued. "Now here's the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it."
Anyone who has used a PC knows that their computer will resume much faster from a hibernate mode instead of a full reboot, and that is essentially how Microsoft will boost its boot time with Windows 8.
"With hibernation, we're effectively saving the system state and memory contents to a file on disk (hiberfil.sys) and then reading that back in on resume and restoring contents back to memory," Aul wrote. "Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70 percent faster on most systems we've tested)."
Microsoft also added a new multi-phase resume capability, "which is able to use all of the cores in a multi-core system in parallel, to split the work of reading from the hiberfile and decompressing the contents," Aul said. "For those of you who prefer hibernating, this also results in faster resumes from hibernate as well."
While this is not completely identical to a cold boot, Aul did say that Windows 8 will initialize drivers for "those of you who like to cold boot in order to 'freshen up' drivers and devices."
If this is not your cup of tea, though, Windows 8 will contain the option to revert back to the Windows 7 shutdown/cold boot behavior, Aul said.
Microsoft has used its Windows 8 blog to provide a few snippets about what the new OS will have, including an Explorer "ribbon," an app-like desktop experience, support for ripped DVDs, smoother file management, robust USB 3.0 support, and an app store.
More information about the OS is expected to be unveiled at next week's BUILD conference in Anaheim, California; (which might include a Windows 8 beta). PCMag will be there and report back with all the details. Until then, check out the slideshow from Sinofsky's June Windows 8 demo above.