Microsoft has said that Windows 8 will have much faster boot-up times than Windows 7.
Microsoft divisional chief Steven Sinofsky wrote in a blog that when the user session is closed, Windows 8 hibernates the kernel session, instead of hibernating it, resulting in a boot-up time of as less as two seconds.
Sinofsky said that many people want to turn their PCs on and have it be a "fresh start" rather than running all of the stuff from their previous session.
Sinofsky said, "Sleep/resume is the best option for fast on/off transitions on today’s PCs, but it still consumes some power in order to preserve the contents of RAM, which means battery drain – even if it’s only a little bit on a well optimized system. All of this is happening with the backdrop of how we all use our mobile phones today, which is almost never restarting them, and always using what feels closest to a sleep-like state."
The company wanted to design design a way to meet all of the desires on today’s PCs without requiring some special new hardware.
Subsequently, the company made many improvements to the boot path in Windows 7, including parallel initialisation of device drivers, and trigger-start services.
Sinofsky said the key difference for Windows 8: "As in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. 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."
