By | No Comments
Last updated: Tuesday, November 4, 2008

New laptops that boot up in 30 seconds? Too slow for me. Five seconds? Better. But what I want is a machine that is ready in about a second, just like my smartphone. I’m fully aware that expressing any impatience with a computer’s boot time invites derision. When the entire globe is engulfed in an economic crisis, measuring the seconds required to start different computers may seem the most trivial of concerns. Still, I’m not alone. Unhappiness with boot times, which commonly run from 45 seconds to 60 seconds, is shared by many computer users, as reflected in much online discussion of the issue. I’ve come to believe that the unhappiness does not illustrate impatience. Rather, it reflects an important shift in computing, as we increasingly rely on our laptops not as machines that we use for long stretches at a time, but as machines for using the Internet, often and briefly, and not much else. We don’t tolerate, and have never tolerated, long wait times that are disproportionate to the activity that follows them. If we need to spend only a few seconds looking up something on the Web, it’s only natural that we want the preparatory time to be as close to zero as possible. It’s not impatience, just proportionality. Smartphones provide access to e-mail and the Web. Now a fast-growing category of notebook computers, called netbooks, do the same, but with bigger displays and keyboards than the phones. Netbooks are lightweight and inexpensive — about $400 for many models — but to be truly useful, they need to be on and ready to go immediately, the way smartphones are. We hear computer manufacturers promoting laptops that can boot faster than ever, but they prudently avoid direct comparisons with smartphones. The manufacturers have speeded up boot times by equipping some Windows machines with…

Continued here:
Laptops Need Faster Bootup Times

CommentSubscribe