Microsoft promises faster-booting, SSD-friendly Windows 8

Windows 8, the upcoming new version of Microsoft’s flagship operating system, promises to boot faster and be friendlier to the new generation of solid-state drives (SSDs). Gabe Aul, a director of program management in Windows, said the faster boot is based on a new technique that combines the traditional cold boot and resumption from hibernate mode. “(In) 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 (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested)," Aul in a blog post. Aul noted Windows had been scrutinized, measured and picked apart via its boot, citing data that 57 percent of desktop PC users and 45 percent of laptop users shut down their machines rather than putting them to sleep. Overall, half of all of users shut down their machines rather than putting them to sleep, he added. But he also pointed out hibernation is a good option since it also does not use energy, although it saves all settings on a large hibernate file. He said their challenge had three goals:

• Effectively zero watt power draw when off
• A fresh session after boot
• Very fast times between pressing the power button and being able to use the PC.

“It’s faster because resuming the hibernated system session is comparatively less work than doing a full system initialization, but it’s also faster because we added a new multi-phase resume capability, which is able to use all of the cores in a multi-core system in parallel, to split the work of reading from the hiberfile and decompressing the contents. For those of you who prefer hibernating, this also results in faster resumes from hibernate as well," he said. “This new fast startup mode will yield benefits on almost all systems, whether they have a spinning HDD or a solid state drive (SSD), but for newer systems with fast SSDs it is downright amazing," he added. But he said Windows 8 will still offer an option for a may want complete shutdown, such as for opening the system to add or change some hardware. — TJD, GMA News