Windows 7 to get ‘instant on’ mode?

[amigaksi]

>by jlmjr1957 on 2008/10/17 11:35:10

>My TI 99-4/A would boot into a game or app in about 1/2 >second after turning it on.

Yeah, that's the same for many of the earlier machines like Atari 800, Atari XEGS, C64, etc.  

>Of course it could take a while to load from a disk it you needed something that had been saved. Or even worse, trying to get something off of a cassette tape.

Nah, nowadays with disk and cassette simulators available for many 8-bit machines, you can read the data almost instantaneously.  Even on an Atari 800 with a cassette simulator, I can easily read 6Kbytes/second.  Now given, that most Atari 800 games/apps are <16KB.  That's less than 3 seconds of load time for any application.

>I wonder why they can't have the basics of the OS load from a rom or flash card. That way you can log in to the system and get started while waiting for non-essential stuff to load.

One good reason for putting in ROM is that because they keep updating stuff and fixing bugs in the OS and in drivers.  It's easier and more standard to update the hard drive than the re-program ROMs and BIOSes.  

[amigaksi]

>by adolescent on 2008/10/17 12:40:12

>Why is booting the OS a benchmark for the speed of the OS? >XP and Vista cold boot in <30 seconds. Not really huge >amounts of time. With stand-by and hibernation it's much >quicker.

That's before you surfed the internet and installed the various printer drivers, monitor drivers, AOL messenger, SKYPE drivers and other drivers that you don't need, but someone thought "what the heck, there's 2GB RAM."

I installed Windows 3.1 in a 1Ghz machine, and it boots up in less than 8 seconds.  It just doesn't have drivers for all the new hardware so I had to use standard VGA, Sound Blaster compatibility mode, etc.