Phoenix hijacks Windows boot with instant-on If Phoenix Technologies gets its way, we may lose the precious time spent while Windows leisurely ambles from slumber at startup. Those countless minutes, perhaps, we didn't realize we counted on to: wash the dog, mow the lawn, check tire pressure, reject the idea that the most certain and primary reality is rational …
that booted to a BASIC interpreter if no OS was found?
Ah, the good old days, along with twinax networks, 4800 baud modems and computers needing co-processors and strange 16 bit processors with an 8 bit data bus, and double sided 5.25 inch 320 kb diskette drives where "double sided" meant "remove disk, turn over, re-insert, Sanyo PC's with 160 kb of RAM, DOS without sub-directory support, or CP/M... I'm getting misty eyed :)
Anyone else around who remembers the "directing the Turtle" program on AMSTRAD PCW's?
Hibernate: while shutting down your PC, wait till summer comes round again while the nGB memory image is written to disk.
Didn't Shuttle, Asus or someone like that do a prettified small form factor "entertainment PC" (this was before "media PCs" were hiptrendy) a few years back that could run most of its multimedia stuff direct from a Linux in ROM?
Acorn Archimedies anyone? Arthur, followed by RISCOS, both fully featured windowing environments ready to go in no time...
Oh, yeah, some other company who ripped off all of Acorn's ideas did it too, I think they were called Apple, or something*. I wonder what happened to them...
(*It's a joke! no flamewar required.)
Personally, there are just times when I don't want to load an entire OS (coughvista, sneezexp, throatclear*nix)... All I want to do is check the email for any new death threats and maybe the weather...
In a world that is dead set on going green, maybe it's not as pragmatic to keep my little home data center up 7/24, with UPS's and generator.
And while just about everybody who can remember a COCO, trash 80, IBM PC/xt, apple II, et. al, can recount some quick boot scheme, two words: That was then, this is now...
The world of OS's has become bloated with additional services, apps, scrips and other such crap that under casual circumstances, really aren't necessary. But, software publishers INSIST on burying them in the boot sequence so their presence is felt.
About the only way one can accomplish a fairly quick boot scheme in a wintel box is to take a brand new machine, reformat the hard drive and install a virgin copy of the OS, and then tweak to what you deem acceptable, or switch to *nix.
Or, you could just leave the machine on... Hooked to a UPS and maybe even a generator.
i was playing with an embedded processor and associated toolchain a couple of weeks ago...
byte x=0;
void main(void){while (1) x=x+1;}
lo and behold : 3682 bytes of rom code .... startup code ,intialisation code , exception handling code , runtime library. after tweaking the compiler options very heavily i got it down to 92 bytes of rom code ...
i wrote it in assembler
incr acc
jump 0
8 bytes ... ( machine is 32 bit... 4 bytes for the increment ACC and 4 for the jump 0 )
where's my hole punch ..... with some squeezing we should be able to fit windows on about 50 cards ...
Almost any mainframe used to work that way. Way, way back I thought why to IPL (boot) a system to run self contained programs like some hardware testing, backups, etc and wrote a loader for certain IBM mainframes. Did work like a dream, startup time whatever it took to load the program(s) and you were running. Our hardware guys loved it. Never tried to go further, no time, but modified one console game to run that way. A dream, the whole mainframe for a game, no OS overhead, much fun!
Ah yes, the wonderful windows "Hibernate" option where it'll typically either just crash and BSOD on resuming. If it does happen to resume, when the desktop bothers to reappear, will be so unusably slow (and remains that way for about 20 minutes), that the only sane recourse is a hard reset and wait for the OS to restart from scratch.
Yep, can see that relying on that's a great idea.
Surely this has been invented a little late, given that microsoft have already released Vista Sideshow, which will allow simple stuff to be used (check mail, calendar) without even switching on the big PC.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/microsoft/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-vistas-sideshow-232608.php
This whole event driven gui thing was originally a way of getting around not having a proper operating system.....so Phoenix has built another version of early Windows. Should have stuck with 98.
I often wonder what's going on in a typical modern Windows machine. There's a lot of stuff for the amount of useful work its doing.
Dunno what all the fuss is about.
I have a laptop and a desktop both running Vista. Whenever I finish working, press the sleep button and it powers down in less than 30 seconds (and as I've finished, I 'leave it to it', before you all start saying... "ooh but that's half a minute of my life wasted"). When I power the machine up again (a quick press of the space bar or open the lid) the logon screen is ready quicker than the LCD display warms up in.
Only need to reboot is when updates/new software installed - time to make a cuppa while waiting machine to reload. Easy really... you should try the 21st Century some time, it's not as scary as you think!
Worth remembering old micros with fast boot times were generally just starting a program in ROM, not actually loading anything per se, which is cheating. Also, never did see an IP stack on one of those; operating systems aren't just bloated, they're actually justifiably far bigger than they used to be.
Anyway, I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of an RM MiniBook (EEE PC) yesterday and it has a pretty tight boot time into a fairly minmal (but GUI) Linux environment. Not at all bad.
If we all want fast boot times, and we're all going green, might I suggest smaller, slower systems running less flashy operating environments? With a 1GHz CPU, 512Mb of core and a 4Gb flash disk you can comfortably play media (OK, need an external hard drive to store much of it, but hey), use OOo, use Firefox and check mail, all with very low power consumption, virtually no noise at all (and I suspect in a larger, desktop case the fan could be eliminated too) and at a reasonable price.
(This is not an astroturf post from ASUS. Honest, I just think the EEE PC is great. As a former Psion fan this is exactly the sort of machine I've always hoped someone would release.)
I wonder how many people in the industry remembers that the original IBM PC boots into ROM BASIC if it's started up without disks in the drive or hard disks connected. And back then, BASIC could do everything, including servicing crude terminal software to connect to BBSes and even the internet if you feel like it.
"Laptops are a different kettle of fish, I grant you - but laptops are for wimps, women and wankers showing off on trains ;)"
No.. That'll be Mac's..
If I've got enough room to breath, I get my Laptop out on the train because i've got work to do and I get paid piece work. Every second I sit contemplating the joys of summer and how much I like the skinny top the gorgeous blonde opposite is wasted money.. But since it's no longer summer, and on British trains the person opposite usually looks like this:
http://www.sourcetext.com/images/ugly.jpg
I'm happy to get my laptop out.. I usually keep it hibernated, so it does only take a few seconds to boot.
Hibernate works fine on every PC I've ever used it on (XP or Vista). It takes my 3gb PC a maximum of 1 minute to be back where it was when it was hibernated. I only shutdown/reboot when an update forces me to. Both my laptop and desktop run happily for weeks like this.
... One of the worst data loss incidents I had on my laptop was caused by using the Hibernate option. When the PC resumed it completely lost the profile for the user, ie anything in My Documents, browser favourites, programme preferences etc. Now I save all my work on a separate partition to the windows system and never use Hibernate.
I love the hibernate option!! Can honestly say I've never been let down by it. I'll only ever shutdown properly when I've got patches to apply. Relatively modern PC and laptop using it as well. Remember confusing the hell out of an "engineer" who fixed a laptop at work once by swapping the hard disk out into another model and couldn't understand why it was "resuming" in the new model.
As for an OS on a ROM - would be a bugger to patch!
LOGO - ah, FORWARD 10, LEFT 90 - loved it:
http://lhogho.sourceforge.net/
for a modern compiler
Was it called Tomahawk? Faintly remember something like that, my parents loved playing Batman and Robin on it and Head Over Heels (forgotten classic), as well as the Jewels of Darkness set and a fighter sim called Ace (not very good but I thought it was the dog's).
Also, Vista goes to sleep when you click the shut down button, takes 5 seconds to shut down and 5 seconds to boot up again. Happy, happy medium (although it doesn't work too well with my USB headset).
my home pc stays always on too, but precisely for the reason that it takes a while to boot.
if I want to use my machine I want to use it NOW, not turn it on, make a cup of tea, and come back when it's finished booting - this sort of thing might be precisely what's needed to get me back into the habit of turning my computer off at night.
Kturtle for KDE should satisfy anyones logo needs :) Only played around with it a bit but its impressive what a few short lines can do.
As for booting into a minimal version of linux, is this related in any way to openbios ? I seem to remember they where getting boot times (not resume, full boot into a gui. xfce I think) of around 5 seconds using some clever tricks.
cheers
Don't know what machine you're dealing with, but the XP laptop I use hibernates in about 30 seconds and resumes in about the same. Actually, we use a LOT of XP laptops with hibernate enabled and I've never seen the problems you describe.
The comments above concerning entertainment PCs etc struck a chord with me. While it's not virtualisation, haven't we had tons of machines for a while now that can boot into a limited environment to run a limited set of apps (usually media related)?
Yes, you're both right - but the good old Acorn Archimedes (I still have and use two RISC PCs, one of which runs the Acorn32 version of NetBSD and the other RISC OS 3.7) was designed for the entire OS to reside on and run from a ROM chip. Upgrading your OS simply meant opening the top, taking out the old chip, and putting in a new one (as I did when I upgraded from ARM3 to StrongARM processor). There is a maximum of five seconds while it warms up, POSTs, and so forth, and then you're in a waiting and fully-useable windowed desktop environment. And this was nothing new for the RISC PC - it came out in 1995, when this way of working was old stuff for Acorn machines...
So...
Disks (RAID?, CD/DVD?, ZIP?, Tape?).
Drivers (RAID, Bonded networking, Printers etc?).
Graphical windowing.
Non-standard input devices? (Tablets, specialist periphs for disabled?)
Get HTML emails so, Browser
Get Office docs, so word/excel/pp viewer?
PDF viewer?
Audio player?
Video player?
personalised settings (background, email, proxy, network etc?)
Will that lot really load very quickly?
This reminds me of a thought Ihad a bit ago regarding games. Really, most of windows isn't used in games, just the drivers, file system and directx... So surely it would be fairly easy to make a rapid boot version of that lot on one bootable cd (dvd?)....
"Ah yes, the wonderful windows "Hibernate" option where it'll typically either just crash and BSOD on resuming. If it does happen to resume, when the desktop bothers to reappear, will be so unusably slow (and remains that way for about 20 minutes), that the only sane recourse is a hard reset and wait for the OS to restart from scratch.
Yep, can see that relying on that's a great idea."
Oh, using vista then ? UPgrade to XP.
Maybe you should try configuring your machines correctly then?
Both my desktop and laptop work flawlessly when hibernating (until the domain session times out after a couple of weeks and you have to do a logout and login before you can access resources again) and my mediacentre goes into and out of standby perfectly from the remote control!
I remember LOGO too....
Anyone for the RM Nimbus?
I remember sitting at the switch console of a PDP11/40, and switching in the following:
(load tape to load point)
100000 (dduddddddddddddddd examine)
012700 (dddddududuuudddddd deposit)
172526 (dduuuudududududuud deposit)
010040 (dddddudddddddudddd deposit)
012740 (dddddududuuuuddddd deposit)
060003 (ddduuddddddddddduu deposit)
000777 (ddddddddduuuuuuuuu deposit)
100000 (dduddddddddddddddd start)
(tape moves)
000000 (dddddddddddddddddd start)
ROM boot-straps? Paper tape. Pah. Real geeks use switches!
The Arch with its 2Mb RISC OS on a chip, lots of shiney windows and colours and a mouse.
I never did fill my 80Mb (yes Mb) HDD I had on my old A3000.If it crashed it usualy meant you had spilled coffee into one of its air vents. It even worked with a Heathkit (?) home made 2800 baud modem!
I presume they'll squash a BSD kernel into a ROM chip with a cpl of tools (I don't see them rushing to use GPL'd code) The problem is unless you're running a builtin network card (wired or wireless) isn't it unlikely that you'll have the drivers available to be able to connect to the internet to read your mail? I have a USB WiFi dongle 'cause I don't think WiFi (or colour TV) had been invented when I got my box for example.
It's a nice idea - want to check your mail but you have to leave the house in 5 mins tops so you can't wait for Vista to boot etc. I'm just not convinced it'll be practical for everyone at the moment.
Maybe some sort of embedded system can boot quickly but I always found that it takes Linux just as long, if not longer, to boot from a cold start as does Windows.
If you only have to reboot every few years, I guess you'd tend to forget that long boot time. I prefer to turn my boxes off when not in use.
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