Microsoft Windows 8 Boots in 8 Seconds – Video Proof

It appears that the days of having time to brew a cuppa and make a sandwich whilst waiting for Windows to boot up could soon be over. A Windows 8 demo shows a brand new machine ready for work in mere seconds!

Apple users have often poked fun at the iceage it takes for a PC to boot but, although the Windows 8 machine wont be winning any drag-races against the MacBook Air and its instant on this is still big news for Windows users such as my goodself 🙂

The blisteringly fast, 8 seconds, start time is down to Microsoft engineering smartie pants coming up with a hybrid hibernation / shut down option that saves the Windows 8 kernel session – thanks to this new tech it all means that the processing time needed for your puter to be ready is significantly cut down.

Steven Sinofsky explains on the MSDN blog: “Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk,”

Unlike the hibernation option on your Windows 7 PC (apparently there’s only half of us using this option according to Microsoft anyway) the Windows 8 shut down won’t save your open programs. So, basically nothing will change for 50% of us and we get a huge reduction in watching the Windows logo.

“If you’re not familiar with hibernation, we’re effectively saving the system state and memory contents to a file on disk (hiberfil.sys) and then reading that back in on resume and restoring contents back to memory.

“Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems.”

I hope that makes total sense to some of you – to me this just means fastness which is very cool and long awaited 🙂