Change to Bios will make for PCs that boot in seconds | Hacker News Reader

Change to Bios will make for PCs that boot in seconds

bbc.co.uk

63 pointssoitgoes62 comments

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".

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."

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

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

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

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

Just move to NYC or SF and you'll be all set:)

The cheapest 256GB one on newegg costs about what I pay a month for rent. I must ask, though, why in the world do you need 512GB for your boot drive? The 32GB in my HTPC was 70 USD and is amazing and plenty. My main Windows desktop only has 100 GB used out of 640 (hdd obviously).

My laptop only has one hdd bay. It would be a wasteful to use SSD space for my media collection and big app installs, but the alternative of having an external hdd hanging from the laptop all the time would be a net step backwards as far as I'm concerned.

512 was kneejerk binary; 320 would do :-)

My media collection is on my media server. That's got 4x1T+4x1.5T drives in ZFS RAIDZ: a little too much to fit on a laptop. Laptops can get away with ~80G, just about, for Windows 7, and probably less with other OSes. But probably something like the C300 (256G) would be a better choice.

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.

There are fast SSDs and slow SSDs. You probably got a slow one. The Crucial C300 and Intel X25-M are really fast.

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.

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.

is deprecated | has depreciated ?

Deprecated is past tense so either "was deprecated" or "has been deprecated" works.

Can someone, more knowledgeable than I, confirm this?

I'm no English major by any stretch, they never teached us grammar at school ;0)

My take: Deprecated is also used in computing to refer to the current status of a particular service or part (e.g. of a program or OS). "Parallel port printing is deprecated" means "Parallel port printing is 'no longer going to be supported going forward and likely to be removed completely'". Strictly yes it was deprecated as a completed action in the past but the status is that it is deprecated now.

Present tense indicates hope that Apple will come to their senses. As "It's currently depreciated, but will come back in full force."

EDIT: Well, the proper from without using "be" is: Too bad Apple depreciated FireWire in favor of USB.

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

Can stock Windows boot from a USB drive? That'd be super convenient.

It just depends on the BIOS. Nothing to do with windows. Virtually all computers sold in the last 5 years or so can boot off of USB drives.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I know plenty of people are happy with Windows 7 and Vista but with me Windows has such a bad history of crashing/hanging while coming out of sleep/hibernation that I can't trust it.

Oh, I love Ubuntu and am never happy with anything but, but Windows Vista/7 have parity with Macs on resume, and way outpace Linux (if only because the hardware is built for Windows.)

My boss' Vostro was inexplicably hanging on logout/login, that seems to have corrected itself after a few forced reboots. (And I've had that experience a few times on all OS's, including OS X.) Actually, I can't remember it for Linux, but Ubuntu is much less careful about shutting down gracefully than Mac/Windows.

I don't think it's an issue anymore -- every modern machine I have right now (even a netbook running XP) is flawless coming out of sleep/hibernation. From my experience, the vast majority of windows laptop users almost never shutdown their computers.

I've had two machines: an HP DV5000 (AMD/ATI) model and a Macbook Pro. Both of them have not been reliable with sleep mode using a stock Windows XP/Vista install (plus drivers/updates). I haven't tried Windows 7 in sleep mode yet but it's not worth my time to risk losing work. I've only had OSX fail once due to a crash* in sleep mode in 2 years (and over a thousand sleep/wake cycles).

* I've had four failures to wake from sleep due to low battery in a 2 month span I was dealing with an old battery that was failing.

Pressing the home button on an iPad?

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.

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).

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

IIRC it transitions into hibernation after 'x' hours of no activity ( I believe x == 6 ), not sure.

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.

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

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).

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 .

You must dig up the title to this book!

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.

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....)

I particularly like the floppy disk clip art.

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.

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

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

I doubt it will ever change.

There's a generation of kids growing up right now who think that's an icon which means "save" - they've never seen a floppy.

I wonder how many phrases/icons are there that apply to obsolete technology?

One that I can think of off the top of my head: The phrase "you left your phone off the hook" to describe a phone that hasn't been turned off.

There's that ribbed drum lookin' thing that gets used as a database icon.

"dial tone"

"punch a clock"

Clock punching still happens some places.

Every morning at 4:45am in my house.

> 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

All recent IBM x86 servers use UEFI.

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