The Humble Geek

All of our advanced technology usually has one drawback. How long does it take to start up? This may range from a few seconds, but in the case of a computer it falls in the range of a few minutes. Hardware has to be initialized and configured for use and that takes time. Are there ways to alleviate that time? Yes!

Tweaking boot times is no light matter, and you will need to have some knowledge about how a computer works internally. I'll be referencing Linux to begin with and Windows to conclude. There's a nice tool to visualize boot times called bootchart that displays each process that runs during the boot process. This ingenious tool can pinpoint locations of high latency, but you the user will have to work on fixing any problems. Linux distributions, such as Fedora, are using this tool to speed up boot times and will show benefits in Fedora 9, which is due to be released in a few weeks. The tool will continue to be used as to prevent regressions and further speed up boot times. My own personal usage of this tool allowed me to shave off 10 seconds by disabling the Red Hat Graphical Boot program. On the other side of the island, things are not so bright. Sure, Microsoft gives it a good go at limiting boot up time, but it isn't customizable or configurable. There isn't much else to say about it simply because there's nothing you can do about it. Usually a network driver causes longer delays and you're stuck at the animated scroll bar for extra unnecessary seconds. However, in the future it may be possible to have next to nothing boot times as we will have dozens of CPU cores and hyper fast solid state drives.