"we want to start with boot time – no feature gets talked about and measured more."
What?
I've never understood why I should care since it's something I do once a week or less for a few seconds.
What?
I've never understood why I should care since it's something I do once a week or less for a few seconds.
My father's laptop, larded with the corporate, err, "value add software", once took five minutes to pass that gauntlet, without even any local network activity. You do want to make sure you can pull open the browser and do a bit of real work, though; the desktop appeared in about a minute, but you couldn't actually do anything. With the Maverick release of Ubuntu, the same test could be passed in 45 seconds. (Still not what I'd call speedy, I just include that for reference. Yes, it's a laptop and the hard drive hurts, but the hardware wasn't that bad. Also, this was XP, which I know from experience on that hardware should have taken roughly 45 seconds too.)
You might understand why it's a bit of a sore point with many people whose wallets Microsoft is listening to after that experience.
(It appeared to me, based on the process list and the way the machine was performing, that the simultaneous presence of backup software trying to scan every file access and virus scanning software trying to scan every file access, and for all I know trying to each perform other real scans of the disk, was causing major disk thrash, which combined with the fact the virus scanner insisted on scanning various files before the OS could execute them caused major, major slowdown. I'd never put up with this on my machine, but somehow I suspect this is not an uncommon case in the corporate world...)
Not "and now you know why Windows is fundamentally incapable of starting up quickly". Phrased it that way on purpose.
Why would I want my home PC turned on at 3AM, exactly?
Ok, maybe that's just me, but I suspect I can't be the only HN reader who uses his home PC at 3 AM more than he does at 3 PM.