Today Windows 8 development team has showcased an interesting feature of upcoming Windows 8. Windows 8 Development Team claims that Windows 8 will boot 30-70% faster on most systems as compared to previous Windows releases. There will be very few seconds between pressing the power button and being able to use the PC.
According to the Telemetry data, most of the users like to Shut down their Machine in order to save battery life or Power consumption and some of us like to Hibernate the system for instant access to the system.
Based on Telemetry data and users feedback Development team had overcome following challenges:
- 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.
However, Microsoft has found solution for this challenges. In Windows 7, when a user hit shut down button from Start Menu, Windows close all of the user sessions, and in the kernel session Windows close services and devices to prepare for a complete shutdown.
Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, Windows close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, Windows 8 will hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, 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, which takes substantially less time to write to disk.
Another important thing to note about Windows 8’s fast startup mode is that, Windows 8 will do initialize drivers in this fast startup mode and for those of you who like to cold boot in order to “freshen up” drivers and devices will be glad to know that is still effective in this new mode, even if not an identical process to a cold boot.
This new fast start-up 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. Check out the video below to see for yourself:
