I think a lot of the boot up time is "Plug&Play", that is the system is probing what's out there peripheral and network wise. It puts out "who's there messages" and network broadcasts asking for responses, and waits some time for all the responses to come in. I think there's a trick like holding the shift button down when booting to tell the system that the same stuff is out there that was there before -- not sure though.
Another delay may be because the operating system is probably written in C++ and object oriented, so has to run thru gazillions of constructors to start all the programs. I think if an OS is going to be used by millions of people, it ought to be carefully handcrafted in assembly and C to run efficiently and not in a language convenient for the programmers. Hoyt Stearns Scottsdale, Arizona -----Original Message----- From: Jed Rothwell [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, December 30, 2008 3:56 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Vo]:OFF TOPIC A prediction about future computers It is common knowledge that in the not so distant future hard disks will be replaced with solid state memory, and MPP architecture will become commonplace. No doubt computers will run thousands of times faster than they do now, just as today's computers run anywhere from 1000 to 100,000 times faster than personal computers did circa 1980 (my estimate -- I would like to see a more authoritative estimate). Anyway, I would like to make a prediction about these upcoming machines. Despite the fact that they will run thousands of times faster, I predict that it will still take two minutes to turn Windows on. And to turn it off, for crying out loud! Why it takes so long to terminate a program is a mystery. The disk access light flutters and twitches, but the program gives no hint what it is up to. By the standards of 1980 these things are supercomputers and in two minutes you could probably enumerate every person in the U.S. Anyway, two minutes seems to be a built-in computer constant, along with the price of whatever computer you want to buy, which Dave Barry defined as: "$500 more than you hoped to pay." - Jed
