I haven't seen one of these threads anywhere, it's pretty fun. Now I can see how fast my comp boots up compared to others.

Rules:
You must measure the time between pressing the Power On button to the full load of the Login/Welcome screen. (Full load, i.e. When you can click your username).

System
------------
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise
512MB PC133 SDRAM
Intel Pentium 3 700Mhz (100FSB)

Boot Time
------------
1:11

Factors
------------
Subtract 3 seconds since the mobo shows my CPU temp for 3 seconds before proceeding.

Now, let's see how I compare. To me, that's very fast for such a slow computer.

Just wait until MYOB or Mic post their 15 second BeOS loading times.. :p

Hehe, not quite.. It takes 42 seconds from hitting the power button, thanks to my mainboard checking that everything is in order. I could also cut a few seconds by disabling loading of 100 MB ramdisk from a file but that could be cheating as I use it all the time :giddy:

Windows loads quite a lot of things after you click login, too ;)

It only takes about 30 seconds to fully load Windows after I click logon :P

* MS SQL Server
* Sygate Personal Firewall
* AVG Anti-Virus
* ATI Desktop

I'll have to get an exact timing but its 25 seconds to the boot sound being played - the last event on the startup chain. I have fast boot on in the BIOS so theres no checking, and I have very liitle loading at boot, unlike Mic

A person on NewEgg said this:


Put 1GB of this [Mushkin DualDDR PC-3500 Level II RAM] in an ASUS P4C800-E DLX with a 2.4C (both from Newegg), set the FSB @ 260, DDR to 5/4 (DDR333) with 2-2-2-6 timings and I'm flying along at 3.12Ghz w/DDR416 @ 2-2-2-6.

How fast is it? Well with a new WD 74GB SATA Raptor (also from Newegg) it is very fast. Cold boots to my Windows XP desktop in under 6 seconds.


Under 6 seconds? Is that even possible? ... :confused:

If so I'm in for a treat since that's basically my [new] system :D

I think "Cold boot" is actually not checking or posting, or doing diagnostics, checking the drives, etc.

You'd have the fastest boot time right after installing Windows on a fresh or reformatted hard drive after setting some of the msconfig values to save time... like nogui boot and the time to check for drives to be reduced to 3 (min.), etc.

The thread was a good thought, but there are way too many factors for this. Plus, I won't reformat to just get a fast boot time. Daily use....

Havnt timed mine yet.. maybe I'll get around to it.

SubKamran, Im not sure what their definition of "cold boot" is, but only they are coming back from Hibernation, I dont believe it :p

If I remove some of my RAM, I might be able to POST in under 6 seconds...

LOL - I have a problem believing 6 seconds - sorry. I'd have to see the machine boot up for myself - and they'd have to let me play around on the machine also. I can't see any consumer OS on consumer hardware booting that quickly :)

It takes around 30 to 35 second for my two PCs to boot to Windows Logon Screen,

Originally posted by LNCPapa
LOL - I have a problem believing 6 seconds - sorry.


He did say post no boot... Guess he means that he has so much ram that the BIOS spends ages checking it's actually there...

Had it been booting, then I'd agree with you papa...

LOL - I believe Storm - and I understand about the long mem check taking sooooo long :) I meant I don't believe what the guy from newegg said.

Ah, then I see.. :o

About the newegg guy, yeah, I'm having trouble believing him too... Had it been another OS, but XP...

Maybe using the idea Xtr-X said it could possibly be 6 seconds. The Windows XP boot screen takes a little while though.

Originally posted by SubKamran
Maybe using the idea Xtr-X said it could possibly be 6 seconds. The Windows XP boot screen takes a little while though.

umm, no that wouldn't work since what XTR-X said makes no sense. I'm not following what he means by it doesn't do all the checks because my systems take pretty much the same time to boot, whether cold or warm.

BTW, yea Papa, I was refering to the RAM checking earlier when I was talking about POST time.

As far as I am aware, No OS with a GUI can fully boot to the desktop in 6 seconds(unless it is returning from something like hibernation)

There are some very quick BIOSes out there that practically start booting Windows in a second or two. I've seen some P4 boards that would boot so fast, they would not even show the POST or BIOS splash screen. :)

But booting Windows XP... That's a different story.

6 seconds is close to, if not impossible. This is mostly because of the hard disk. Now, if you have 10,000 or 15,000 RPM high capacity drives in RAID, it might be possible.. But then you run into the problem of loading the SCSI or SATA BIOS. :P That alone is 6 seconds.

That post on Newegg was probably made by someone who was excited abou their new setup and embelished a little bit. :)

I have a pair of U320 SCSI drives setup on a dual 2.8 GHz Xeon machine. Boot time AFTER SCSI scan is a good 15 seconds. I'll time it to make sure.

Just timed it - 19 seconds after the SCSI checks... Might be faster if I took out some RAM, but I doubt it would be noticably faster during the boot process.

Mac System 6.0.4 will boot to desktop on an SE/30 (16Mhz with 5Megs of RAM - it comes with 1meg) just after the screen warms up enough for you to see - about 3 seconds. But nobody uses a system that old so guess that doesn't count - but hey system 6 was about like windows95 anyway and some people still use that I think.

Win95 boots on my comp in under 6 seconds (not counting POST)

Windows 2000 takes a while, around 2 minutes I'd say, but why care? I restart my computer maybe once per week ;-)

Note: I ran Win95 just for the fun of it... I use win 2000 as my main OS...

You're "boot time" isn't the time after POST. Its the total time taken for you PC to boot from total cold boot to complete loading and usability of the OS. You will not get that in less than 20 seconds.

Could people post their *real* bootimes then?

I then get about 40 seconds for full functionality :) (This is with my new computer)

From the power button being pressed to my Windows desktop being in a usable state - It takes my computer 26 seconds

This is with a 2600+ (overclocked considerably), 1GB PC 2700 DDR, 160GB hard drive.

So I know the 6 seconds is a lie. :)

I'm right around 48 seconds...I did it 5 times and took the average...not too shabby, but not the fastest by any means I am sure...

System:

Windows XP SP1 with all my super special tweaks
Gentoo Linux 2.4.22
Athlon XP @ 2800+ (2266mhz)
512mb PC2700 CL2 Crucial
WD 80GB / 8mb / 7200RPM / ATA133
K7VTA3 Revision 8
Fujitsu 40GB MPE Elite series, performance, 7200rpm

Windows XP: 23 seconds to login screen, 32 seconds to desktop including inputting my password

Gentoo: 49 seconds to login

Commodore 64 - 1 second.

:P

(primary system 54 seconds...)

I got a new system a couple of days ago:

AMD Barton 2600+ (1917 MHz @ 2126)
512 MB DDR400

the rest is the same what it was in my previous post in this thread.

Now, self-made Linux from Scratch goes from cold boot to login prompt in 17 seconds. It boots to textmode by default, when I type 'startx', it takes 19 seconds for KDE to be ready.

As per the NewEgg guy, my friend I met on IRC (:P) has a server computer with a WD Raptor 74GB and 1512MB of RAM and his starts up in 8 seconds approximately. He uses Windows Server 2003.

I'll have to get the exact timing. Ah hah, found it, 10 seconds minus the RAM detection. (RAM detection is 11 seconds). He didn't have Quick POST enabled that time so that's why the RAM detection took so long.

10 seconds baby, that's fast. Keep in mind all his drives are SATA (including DVD-rom drive).

Originally posted by SubKamran
10 seconds baby, that's fast. Keep in mind all his drives are SATA (including DVD-rom drive).

I doubt it, server OS take longer to boot due to the services starting & there's no such thing as SATA Cd/DVD-Roms.

Not only do I doubt it SubKamran - I flat out don't believe him. I have a Dual 2.8 Xeon with 2 Gigs of RAM and a pair of U320 SCSI drives. I can't get near that time with hardly any apps even installed on the machine. No way you're gonna convince me that any IDE drive is going to be as fast as my SCSI drives. Not a shot at you, but I don't believe your buddy.

hmm, maybe 10 seconds for the desktop / login screen to appear? Like I said in my first post, Windows loads a lot of services after displaying those, and usually the system isn't even really usable during that time.

Not only do I doubt it SubKamran - I flat out don't believe him. I have a Dual 2.8 Xeon with 2 Gigs of RAM and a pair of U320 SCSI drives. I can't get near that time with hardly any apps even installed on the machine. No way you're gonna convince me that any IDE drive is going to be as fast as my SCSI drives. Not a shot at you, but I don't believe your buddy.

Actually, SCSI is much slower than IDE at boot-up for some reason. I actually came here looking for answers why. Even my 1GHz Athlon will boot up WinXP faster than my P4 3GHz U320 15k RAID 0 system. I've also read of people complaining about SCSI's boot up time being so slow that they just decided to go IDE.

I just build a system for someone using an Athlon 64 3000 and a Seagate 7200.7 on SATA 150 and it takes "3 cycles of the bar" on the WinXP splash screen at the most to get onto the desktop. My SCSI RAID 0 takes atleast 11 or 12, not to mention the full SCSI ID scan at the start. Do SCSI drives need time to "spool up"? Someone suggested that to me, but that doesn't seem likely to me, because, how would a SCSI HDD be able to read off the disc if it weren't spinning at a constant rate? Also, regardless of whether it's a reset, where the HDD is already up and running or a complete restart from cold, it takes just as long, so I'm at a loss to explain it. I can only guess that it has to do with SCSI drivers or the SCSI BIOS talking with the CPU over Sunday brunch?

I've also read of people complaining about SCSI's boot up time being so slow that they just decided to go IDE.
Seriously?

I can't believe it's such a big deal if it takes half a minute longer to boot.

How many times a day you (re)boot the computer?

I have two computers here:

One Apple iBook, boots to OSX in one minute. I reboot it only if I have to, after some OS updates, for example. Otherwise it just goes to sleep when I don't use it, and wakes up in about a second.

One Celeron 466 MHz with 160 MB RAM, boots to Win2k in less than two minutes, I haven't counted. It runs 24/7 so I don't care about its boot time.

Seriously?

I can't believe it's such a big deal if it takes half a minute longer to boot.

How many times a day you (re)boot the computer?



Well, I would assume someone would get SCSI for the low seek times, low CPU overhead, and the long MTBF, meaning it's for a computer that's usually on for long periods of time, so reboot times aren't a huge issue. Having said that, however, I have to be honest in that, for a plain desktop, there is something in having a 10 second boot up time, from BIOS to desktop. It feels much more user friendly.

With IDE RAID 0 I've heard that the WinXP splash screen is up for about 1 second. That's pretty cool. Every time I build a system I'm tempted to go IDE RAID 0, and with WD Raptors having a 1 million hour MTBF it seems like a good idea, but I always somehow end up getting SCSI every time. Every time I think I'm out they pull me back in :cool:

The SCSI time delay is the spin up time, enforced by the controller, to prevent disk access before the disks have got up to a safe operating speed.

Not to mention that the computer has to separately load the SCSI BIOS from the controller.

I have to be honest in that, for a plain desktop, there is something in having a 10 second boot up time, from BIOS to desktop. It feels much more user friendly.
I disagree for the reasons mentioned already in this thread - most operating systems continue to load things after displaying desktop, making the user think it's already loaded, but it's not, and therefore feels slow and not user-friendly. I've noticed that in Windows 2000 and XP it can take more than a minute after loading Windows Explorer for all services to stop initializing. But yes, this is just one opinion...

windows xp is ~30 seconds to logon on my fastest machine. it takes a good 5 minutes for my resurrected pentium MMX-233 to start redhat linux 7, xserver and all. i used to leave my P4 on 24/7 but stopped awhile back, so the boot time is nice.

I'm not sure that there is a real fair comparison here. When I first installed XP to my new machine. A64 2800, 1 gig ram, it would end the splash screen for Windows ON the second pass of the dots thing. Then I installed some drivers (probably sound/video/lan) and then it went up to some crap like 8 passes.

I have since installed XP 64 bit and Server 2003 64 bit (both legal) and those boot to desktop and usable WAY faster than my main install. But then again I don't have them loading other stuff. So I think this whole thread is useless for direct comparisons. It all depends on what hardware you have and what drivers are loading to support that.

To make it the most fair it would have to be under these conditions:
Fresh install of XPSP2 on the first reboot after the useable gui. That way there would be no chance for extra drivers installed. But nobody is going to wipe their install just to win some silly boot race. Its all about "Does your system satisfy you?" and if it does then you are already the winner.

57 seconds from power on to login screen.
My system is
P4 3ghz
512mb ram
40gig sata
and 80gig pata
onboard graphics bla bla bla

This post has got me interested in boot time though, so I might try and speed that up a bit.

Any tips??

15 seconds from pushing the power button to the boot menu, 15 more seconds from boot menu to desktop.

AMD Opteron 165 @ 2.8 GHz
3 GB DDR400 RAM
Linux from Scratch installed to Gigabyte i-Ram 3 GB.

http://img400.imageshack.us/img400/1930/bootchartlfs3ghzzp6.png

Mictlantecuhtli what distro are you using? Gentoo? When I installed it from scratch I was able to pull off 10 second boots into x-server, not counting POST, but with post it took something like 49 seconds :(.

Self-made, using Linux from Scratch (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/) instructions.

I could probably boot (from boot menu, that is) to desktop in ten seconds if I wouldn't have to wait for an IP address.

I used to have a windows 95 pc with wide scsi2 in it and that moster took just 15 seconds to fully boot. Mind you, i did have some serious cooling and noise problems with it.:D

I'm guessing the majority of that 15 seconds was SCSI startup sequence.

That only accounted for about 5 seconds, the other 10 was the mobo thinking " where the **** is the ide" lol.:D

Ok, I finally got around to rebooting and the results are in! 28 seconds from power to a fully usable desktop.

This is on my lowly:
P4 3.0 Ghz
1 Gig DDR2
160 Gig SATA II drive

Boogityboo04 thats pretty quick boot time!
Have you done much tweeking on that system?

I know Dells are fast. I have a similar machine same spec, but on 512mb memory, mine boots in about 58 seconds:(

Have you done much tweeking on that system?
I'm kind of OCD about services and things running at boot time :)

So, yeah, I spend a lot of time tweaking

Dells come preloaded with a lot of crap but mine came with a XP Pro disk for free for some reason, so I just reinstalled that when I first got it and it's been running like a charm.