Sleep – system enters an ultra-low-power mode. The CPU is turned off, all drives and fans are turned off, and only enough power is used to keep the contents of memory safe. Typical power use is around 5 watts to sustain sleep mode. A power failure in sleep mode would cause you to lose the contents of memory and thus your state. Typically VERY fast, on the order of 5-10 seconds to sleep and wake.
Hibernate – system memory is written to disk, then powers off. No power is used. A power failure in Hibernate mode is no big deal, because the contents of memory are safely stored on disk. It is slower, because there’s a lot of disk writing when entering hibernation (~30 seconds), and a lot of disk reading before you can resume from hibernation (~20 seconds). This depends heavily on the amount of memory you have, how many apps were running, and the speed of your hard disk.
There’s also an oddball ‘hybrid’ mode in Vista which uses both the hibernate strategy (write memory to disk), and the sleep strategy (enter ultra-low-power mode) so you are covered in all cases. However, I find that hibernate takes a LONG time to write 2 GB+ of memory state to disk, so I’m skeptical how fast this can really be if it includes the hibernate “write everything to disk” step.
The ‘oddball’ deep sleep in Vista is great. With either sleep or hibernate your screen goes black and sites there for a while before actually finishing entering the state anyway.
On a PC that works (hardware support, drivers that work, etc) it always works and your screen turns black and you walk away.
My PC at home takes about 25 or 30 seconds to use the oddball sleep (2GB RAM). I have no reason to sit and watch it since it’s never failed once. That 25 or 30 seconds is time well wasted, especially since I never actually force it to sleep manually. I just have it set to sleep after an hour of lack of use. I come back to my computer after it’s been asleep, move the mouse and it’s back on (2-3 seconds).
Had it lost power (doubtful with a UPS, it’d likely last a day in sleep mode) I would have to wait for a boot but I wouldn’t have ever had to worry about anything.
Also, and I truly have no idea how this happend, but I have a 4 year old tablet PC that boots up with Vista32 faster than it did with XP.
I turn it on and it takes about 35 seconds to get into the desktop.
1.3Ghz, 512MB RAM, 5400RPM 36GB disk
The machine stinks but boy does it boot faster than XP (which was easily 10-15 seconds slower). Though it doesn’t support any form of sleep in Vista because something apparently isn’t working ACPI-wise with Vista.
Boot time has only been an issue for me in a few cases.
Fixing a computer, often I need to boot many many times.
Building a new computer or reformatting one. Again booting and re-booting a lot to update and install software.
Fiddling with BIOS settings and trying to optimize my computers performance.
In these cases though, It is great to have another computer hooked up to a KVM so you can get some other work done while all the long boring installs and reboots are going on. Zzzz
In all other cases I hit the power switch when I get home from work, then go to the bathroom. It’s at the log in screen as soon as I want to use it. Then before bed I power it off.
I don’t ever use the sleep/hibernate modes in Vista. I had bad experiences with them in previous OSs and my bias towards them has carried over, I suppose.
Tweaking the BIOS to improve boot time is
usually out of the question.
No, it isn’t. I recently cut down on the boot time considerably by turning off all the possible boot-devices (usb, floppy, cdrom, network, …) except the harddisk. Now the BIOS time is minimized to few seconds, compared to about 20 seconds before. That was especially bad because it also adds to the time needed to resume from hibernation.
I’m not disagreeing with you (mostly), but I have yet to see an average computer where I sat down to use/fix it and it was set up as a standard user. I believe “too annoying” is the phrase used.
I should clarify that the “gamer” part of my comment was a reference to Jeff “El Cuchillo” Atwood’s post a while back about gamecopyworld.com installing spyware through an ad.
I’m sure that even if we all had impeccable browsing habits and only visited Davide-approved sites, we still run a pretty high risk of drive-by downloads from compromised advertising.
from my experience a “usable” desktop is not in my experience usable… The system is still loading services and thrashing the hell out of the CPU/HDD at that point and at some unspecified point after you can click on the Start menu the system actually becomes really usable
Why do PC’s have a boot time as several people have pointed out most embedded systems boot near instantly and so effectively have no boot time, and most servers are almost never rebooted (or powered off)
Hibernate/Sleep is just a kludge to get round the problem not a fix?
The way I have decreased my start up time, is to create a program that detects an internet connection then load. So I only load the internet applications MSN, Xfire etc, and since my connection is wireless, if I’m loading it not on the internet, speedy boot.
An upgrade from a Pentium 4 for a Quad Core Core 2 based machine must have been completely insane. I am looking to upgrade to a quad core core 2 from an Athlon X2 simply so I can get rid of my buggy Nforce 4 chipset http://www.cockos.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-8047.html
I notice pretty fast boot times, probably around ~30 seconds or less. I wish it were instant though.
Using LinuxBios to replace the slow, buggy mb bios with an optimised version, and installing the boot kernel in a DOC permits very fast boot time. http://linuxbios.org/images/9/97/LinuxBIOS.pdf
As Dennis said, AutoRuns from the SysInternals crew is far more useful then MSCONFIG at determining what runs at startup. It lists things like explorer hooks and property page handlers that MSCONFIG misses.
J. Stoever said “If you reboot daily, something is wrong with you anyways. I haven’t rebooted since may…”
Hmmm… there must be something wrong with me then I guess because I shutdown my PC every day when I’m finished with it and boot it again in the morning. I don’t just let it Sleep because IMO that is a complete waste of power. I could choose Hibernate I suppose, but that takes almost as long as a cold boot, so I prefer to start with a clean slate every morning.
And then there are the inexplicable delays: my laptop, maybe a week after a fresh install of XP w/ SP2, starts getting this weird hangup after logging in. No activity of any kind; no disk, no CPU; mouse still works; task bar still hides/shows. But nothing happens. After a minute or two (!), it pops up a message box saying something about how the system couldn’t find “(null)”. Dismiss, and boot settle-in continues as normal. I reinstalled a couple of times when the thing was new, but each time it eventually reverted to this infuriating behavior. Every now and again, I get a bee in my bonnet to figure out what the sam-hill’s going on, but I never can peg it. Even disabling everything in MSCONFIG doesn’t kill the mystery delay. I’ve just been putting up with it for almost three years now. Sheesh.
There are often a few changes to BIOS setting that you can make to speed up boot times.
Logo - if your BIOS shows a huge manufacturer logo at startup (e.g. Dell) then switch it off. That way you’ll see some informative text instead and the BIOS won’t waste its time loading the bitmap.
Boot Floppy Seek - if you have a floppy drive (if so, why???) then definitely turn this off. If you don’t have one then make sure you “Onboard FDD Controller” is set to disabled.
Boot Order - set your primary hard drive as your first boot device. That way if you leave a CD/DVD in the drive it won’t waste time spinning it up. (Obviously you’ll have to remember to set this back if you want to re-install the OS from DVD).
POST Tests - you can often change these for a bit of speed. Do you really need all of your memory tested at every boot? This is typically listed as “POST Tests”, “Quick Power On Self Test” or “Quick Boot”.