SillyDog701

[Antony]

According to this Cnet report, Windows 8's start up time will be 30% to 70% faster than Windows 7's (on the same machine).

Specifically, Windows 8 uses a hybrid technique intermediate between a full-on restart and the low-power hibernation state. In addition, Microsoft is speeding how fast a system will come out of hibernation by spreading the work across multiple processor cores.
"As in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it," Windows division president Steven Sinofsky said in a blog post yesterday. "It's faster because resuming the hibernated system session is comparatively less work than doing a full system initialization, but it's also faster because we added a new multi-phase resume capability, which is able to use all of the cores in a multi-core system in parallel."

The video Microsoft posted shows the impressive start up time.
Delivering fast boot times in Windows 8 (MSDN Blogs)

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[James]

That's pretty impressive, Antony. I'm looking forward to the real thing.

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[DJGM]

I'm in the process of installing the official Developer Preview of Windows 8 on my testbed PC now . . .

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[James]

We'd appreciate your experience once you have a chance to run it through its paces.

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[DJGM]

Here's the Start screen ... the way I currently have it:




When I tried to save that image to my pen drive, I was presented with this error dialog:



Essentially, it's saying I don't have permission to save a file to my own pen drive, and have to save to
my user folder first. In order to correct this problem, apparently I must contact myself for permission!

Well, I've now had it running less than 24 hours ... and already, some of the default pre-set Tiles on
the Start screen are not working. They click and animate, but the apps behind them won't start.
Also, the options to change the default User Tile (top right corner of first screengrab) from the
generic green and white icon to a personalised image also no longer works.

These features Microsoft are touting as the future for Windows, are broken! The same features
for which this build is aimed at developers. Thankfully the standard classic desktop still works.

I'm posting this from WinXP on my main PC as I've not put any of my usual bookmarks on W8 yet.

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[James]

It's no where near finished, Greg. Come on... we know you hate MS so just admit it. You're looking for things to diss it about but you're losing credibility. Give MS time to work out the bugs. It will be several months yet before this is ready for prime time. THEN tell us about your experience with the finished product.

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[DJGM]

Yes, I really hate Microsoft ... that must be why I run Windows as my main OS and play games on XBox360.
That must also be why I've recently paid out for 6 months worth of Gold level membership on XBox Live.
And that must also be why I spend £200 a year on a Microsoft Technet subscription.

Yes, I really hate Microsoft!

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[James]

Greg... you've ragged on MS ever since I've known you. Your signature demeaning the IE browser is just one example of many that I've noticed over the years and frankly I've always found it a bit juvenile. Geeze... it's a program for crying out loud; not a way of life. Perhaps you run Windows because you have no other choice... I honestly don't know. But the fact remains - Windows 8 is NOT in its finished form by a country mile so your complaints are unwarranted.

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[beanboy89]

I've installed the Windows 8 Developer Preview in VirtualBox to get a general preview of what will be going on in Windows 8. Here are two sets of screenshots (client and server versions) that I've snapped the past day or so. I was not able to get networking drivers installed in VirtualBox, so I have omitted some screenshots of internet-centric features, like the weather, stocks, and RSS apps.

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[Antony]

Thanks Billy,

They look nice and interesting. Is the starting of Windows 8 really faster?

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[DJGM]

FWIW ... I now have the Windows 8 DP installed in a virtual machine within VMware Workstation 8.0,
since just over a week ago, and it's working fine so far. My testbed PC is an aging Pentium 4 system,
while I have VMware on my main quad core PC with full virtualisation active.

I'm currently testing an OperaUnite server on it to stream music, and that seems to be working fine
as well. Other than W8 being nowhere near complete at this time, running it in a virtual machine
does have other caveats like not running the virtualised OS at full native speed.


As for my forum signature, that reflects the only part of Microsoft I'm not a particular fan of ... IE.
True, I used to really slag off Microsoft back when my main machine was a Mac, and I used to
be a bit of an Apple fanboi, it's almost the other way round these days. While I don't wish to
be a fanboi of any technology company, (because IMHO, fanbois need to get a life) I'm most
definitely a regular Microsoft customer, with my XBox360 and Technet subscription.

If anything, it's Apple I'm not particularly liking these days. There way too much control freakery
coming out of 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino lately, much like the sort of control freakery that used
to come from a certain Redmond based company that got it into trouble with the US DoJ.

Although this is off-topic, I'll be brief ... I really do not like the way Apple is conducting itself in
it's lawsuit against Samsung over Galaxy Tab. Since Apple have illegally doctored evidence
to make the Galaxy Tab look a lot more like iPad than it actually does, if the judge has any
sense, he/she should dismiss the case, and charge Apple with perjury.

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[Antony]

It seems like the faster start up of Windows 8 comes at expense of competing open source operating systems. But this expense can actually help Microsoft increase Windows 8's market share as more and more PCs won't be able boot into Linux or FreeBSD easily.

According to The Register,

Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specifications are designed to offer faster boot times and improved security over current BIOS ROM systems. The secure boot feature of the specification is designed so that only digitally signed OS loaders will load, a security feature that would prevent the installation of generic copies of Linux or FreeBSD as well as preventing rootkits and other boot-time malware from running.

(...)

Garrett (from Red Hat) said that Windows 8 certification requires that hardware ship with UEFI secure boot enabled. A feature allowing secure boot to be disabled – necessary to run Linux and FreeBSD on certified systems – is not required for certification.

What a smart move!

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[Don_HH2K]

The faster boot times are done by dumping the state of OS memory to the disk before shutting down - an entirely unrelated technology to the secure booting functions. As for the latter, the requirement is only for systems to ship with it enabled - hopefully those systems will also ship with a means to turn the secure boot functionality off to allow unsigned code to run.

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[Mandrake]

The metro UI might be acceptable on a tablet or smartphone, but for a traditional desktop or notebook it's absolutely terrible. Beyond awful. At least you can turn the bloody thing off. Yuck. I'll be sticking with Windows 7 for certain.

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