ive been using/managing/fixing computers and servers for 40+ years. from old AS400 to full on cloud bullshit. i can remember only a single time where boot time mattered… when microsofts DNS failures caused servers to take 15 minutes to boot… other than that there hasnt been a single time it has ever been a problem or discussed as an issue to be resolved.
so why the fuck is it constantly touted as some benefit!? it grinds my gears when i see anyone stating how fast their machine booted.
am i alone in this?
For some reason my PC recently started taking ages just to get to the UEFI logos.
So far it hasn’t bothered me enough to figure out why though.
I’m not sure if you’re including consumers in this. I have a gaming PC. When I get a message that friends are looking for a game, I want it to be on immediately so I can play.
Am I willing to do something about that? Like get a better drive, finally upgrade to UEFI, etc? No. But I want fast.
this is fairly true… ive not been exposed to end users not in some corp or organization environment…
When computers took minutes to boot, it was annoying. In the days before computers had a suspend feature, you might be turning a computer on and off multiple times a day, and you would just have to wait a while before you could do anything. In the days of windows 95 and some of the subsequent releases, you would just expect to get the blue screen of death constantly, and keep having to reboot. Install something and have to reboot. Waiting on rebooting added up to quite a chunk of time.
These days, I reboot my pc once a week or less, and then it’s back up within a minute. So yeah, it doesn’t even bother me now because it’s such a non-issue. But that’s just because of all the progress that has been made in that area over the decades.
I know it was quite popular to measure boot times when SSDs were first coming out because of the massive speed difference there was from HDDs. I think its just a fun/easy metric to measure and report on today. Most probably don’t care if its 10 or 20 seconds.
in the 80s/early 90s we used a directory listing to demonstrate how fast the machine was… when the pentiums started to hit, it finally listed faster than you could read.
For a general purpose work machine, no. Even for a gaming desktop, probably not. For a gaming laptop, maybe, depending on your lifestyle.
For a gaming handheld? Yeah, definitely. You want a good battery-saving sleep mode, and a quick shutdown/startup as well.
The other scenario I can see is field work machines, for kiosks or task logging, especially if you need to change sites on a regular basis.
it didn’t matter to me until i got a PC which booted super fast
Only if its abysmal.
My windows partition takes upwards of 2 minutes to actually be ready to do anything, my Linux partition is ready to rock ten seconds after I push the power button and four of those seconds are intentional delay to choose a boot disc.
I didn’t care about it before, but I sure do now. Booting into windows these days is torturous in comparison.
Its very important in embedded applications. Think of kiosks or other customer facing software. The longer it takes to boot the longer its out of service before the reboot finishes. It is essentially the upper bound of recovery time after an error.
I don’t remember the last time I rebooted by laptop. Of course it doesn’t run Windows either.
There’s diminishing returns. I don’t think people care much as long as it’s under a minute. Between 1-3 minutes they care a bit. 3-10 minutes and it becomes tedious. 10+ and people get very irritated.
If you’ve ever worked on a corporate system, that last category is very common no matter what the hardware is.
As for people bragging, that’s all it is. They’re saying it’s so fast it can do [meaningless task] in an impressively short amount of time. Presumably, this translates into something more meaningful but harder to benchmark. For instance, they tell you it boots in 5 seconds because that means it can reopen all of their Chrome tabs in 30 seconds.
It’s one of those things that’s not important untill it is. I seem to recall a kernel panic when launching software for a video interview, and in that moment… yeah… i felt every second of boot-up time.
I used to care when it took a long time. But now that it’s pretty fast I don’t care.
people will not reboot their workstations if it takes more than 2-3 minutes. becomes a pain when months of updates are pending and theyre bitching about having to reboot to fix their issues.
reboot workstations every 10 days or so people.
reboot workstations every 10 days or so people.
No.
Only reboot if
needs-rebootingsays so.
how are you over 40 and you don’t remember the boot times before SSDs?
its not that things didnt take a bit longer, its that i never cared between a minute or 5. ive never been a part of a conversation where a customer or coworker lamented boot times at all. it just never mattered. no one ever said ‘gee how can we make this faster’ or ‘if only there were a product that booted faster we would prefer to buy that!’
even when i worked in 911/emergency services, it wasnt a thing that was ever discussed. i guess a lot of stuff had some redundancy/HA so end users werent really affected.
