It's insane how much faster CPUs have become and how slow an average machine boots to full functionality. The days of 'instant on, instant off' are long behind us.
The amount of persistence behind these projects never fails to amaze me, see also the guy that made a miniature version of the Cray-1:
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191877-how-to-build-your...
I threw a solid state drive in my turbo XT and load times even for MS-DOS 3 aren’t good. Loading up Windows 3 is terrible. WordStar can boot okay if you’re not using any TSRs to enhance functionality. You want to load Civilization? There’s a wait.
If we move on to Win98 or 2K on say a Pentium3, with a solid state disk everything becomes somewhat snappy. The SSD is the main gain. Take it away and everything is abysmal.
I love ancient hardware, but if you go back to relive using those machines… it just ain’t what we remember. Our expectations have changed.
Both my Mac and custom built PC boot very quickly. Faster than my PCs in the past. I'm not even doing anything special, just grabbing a generic motherboard, NVMe drive, and installing Windows.
Powering off is a rare event, though. Sleep functionality has been rock solid in both OS X and Windows 10 for me in recent times.
It would be interesting to quantify this across many machines / OSs. Say from cold boot to starting a browser and loading a benchmark webpage (to ensure the network is up and running).
My professional laptop on windows 10 boot in a few seconds but then it takes a minute or 2 for Microsoft Teams to show up and that is with SSDs. In comparison same laptop on linux take a little more time to boot to desktop but I can quickly get a browser window with teams / outlook and open other apps so while it appears slower to boot it is usable roughly at the same time. There are a lot of shitty technics to make windows appear loading faster than it really does.
What matters is not the time for the login screen or desktop to appear but the time until you can be productive on it.
of course if you want to run such advanced software you have to wait for it
Highly frustrating.
That's why you get articles like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831931
And many others besides. Windows can be such a cycle hog. Probably if I installed 64G of RAM and an SSD I could cut it down to something more decent, but I don't use that machine often enough to offset the expense (and never mind driver/installation media hassles, it isn't broken so don't fix it!).
Other machines take on average about a minute or so but they are running Linux, running Windows on them would easily double that.
My daily driver is a T540p (mostly to conserve power) and it works well enough. Not exactly a speed daemon in use but maxed out on RAM (16G), a 2.5 GHz i7 and a fast SSD it doesn't perform nearly as well as my 20 year old self would have expected it to.
OS and browser will happily eat all of that, and I can't use swap because of the audio drop-outs that would cause. If there was a way to shoehorn in more memory I would take it.
My Windows 10 machine boots in 10 seconds at most.
> Probably if I installed 64G of RAM and an SSD...
You're complaining about boot times, but using an OS that has been deprecated for years and using a mechanical HDD?
SSDs have been the norm for a long, long time. Complaining about boot times of deprecated operating systems on outdated hardware that virtually nobody uses in new builds is very misleading.
I hope you can see the irony of complaining about modern boot times by benchmarking things against a completely outdated system.
As for 'new builds', yes, SSDs are faster. But the speed gain from an SSD is negated to some degree by the amount of bloat present in a typical OS and if not for that you shouldn't be able to tell the difference between 'sleep' and 'cold boot', in fact 'cold boot' should be faster (but it really isn't).
As for the complaint: take it with a grain of humor. It was mostly a contrast between booting say my 1980's BBC Micro (you couldn't move your hand from the powerswitch faster than that the prompt appeared) to the times that we have come to accept. SSDs have cut that time to something more acceptable but I fully expect that advantage to be eroded again over the years because that's what happens with software: it always becomes larger and slower, never smaller and faster.
On identical hardware a newer release of any OS is invariably slower than whatever came before.
With Firewire having been deprecated and this mix deck and the windows machine joined at the hip I take the nuisance for granted and just work my way around it. I was lucky to find a card and driver that worked, I must have tried more than 10 different combinations before I found one that worked reliably. Adding an SSD may well upset that balance and would require a complete re-install anyway and that risks ending up with an unstable or unusable system, so that's why that route is closed, though, maybe if I were to copy the image of the current HD to an SSD I could make it work without upsetting things too much.
These cards run with very small output buffers to reduce their latency and any kind of delay will deplete the buffer resulting in a buffer underrun condition and that manifests as a drop-out in the audio stream.
Another alternative is to get rid of the whole kaboodle and do it all in software, that's definitely a possibility with present day gear but I'm kind of partial to this old rig, it sounds great and is very comfortable to work with, much nicer than any pure software solution that I've seen so far.
You should be able to swap back pretty quickly...
If this is a thing, you are already in burn-it-down territory with your hardware.
I've been doing audio for a pretty long time, and I struggle to conceive of a system so marginally-fit-for-purpose-but-still-extant where drive interrupts will threaten audio timings.
If it wasn't for the firewire requirement this would be a very easy problem to solve. I don't understand why that standard is now so blacklisted that it isn't even supported any more by more modern incarnations of windows.
Good article on the subject:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/the-rise-and-fall-of...
Here's metrics from Tom's Hardware comparing an HDD to two types of SSDs (SATA and NVMe)[1] on a Windows 10 machine. The HDD had a boot time of 42.9 seconds. The SATA SSD a time of 17.2 and the NVMe SSD a time of 16.1 seconds.
With the advantage of fast startup the HDD machine was able to boot under a minute but the SATA SSD still cut the boot time of the machine by nearly 2/3rds.
1. https://www.tomshardware.com/features/ssd-vs-hdd-hard-drive-...
I think “booting” might become a concept that goes the way of “download.” That is, it will eventually be unknowable to those who didn’t grow up with it. Computers are just on, and files are just accessed.
I (somewhat) rarely do a full reboot either, and Linux on my laptop may go for a couple of months without a reboot, but I don't really trust that updates to the desktop environment or even lower-level libraries or things like systemd would be in effect without restarting most or all of the system. (Not to mention the kernel, of course, but kernel vulnerabilities that are easily exploitable remotely would probably create a ruckus.)
I guess you could also just trust that there aren't remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in those components, but I honestly don't have the energy to keep track.
By that point rebooting occasionally just becomes simpler.
Fedora runs great on it as well, booting in around 15 seconds, with the exception of suspend making the system unstable but that isn't uncommon with Linux sadly.
For the price and form factor these mini pc are great. I just hope it lasts more than a few months :D
I have a UXTerm based setup with TMUX, lynx, bitlbee, nsxiv, mocp, MPV, ffmpeg, sox, frotz, slashem, mednafen...
No lag except for goverment pages with JS, where I have to briefly launch luakit, but I have a global hosts file adblocking everything.
I'm not sure what would cause your concern.