Here’s How We Booted Windows 10 in 4.9 Seconds (Now, Beat Us)

[Karadjgne]

I'm guessing so can the connection. 2x Asus monitors, 1 is hdmi, the other is dvi-d hookup. The dvi-d is much faster to wake, a good 3-5 seconds faster.

 

[Colif]

so a 640 x 480 VGA Monitor would speed up boot times. I mean, having no monitor at all would speed it up too but hard to prove you boot into windows then. At what point does the removal of functionality go too far in the quest for faster boot times?

Only way to speed it up further would be somehow using a ramdrive, or use a System on a chip as that reduces the speed taken for each system part to talk to each other

Do we really need instant? Can we even tell?
[video="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4vyRvMASPU"][/video]

My startup takes about 49 seconds but as I came from HDD before, so that 49 seconds still feels pretty quick to me. Throwing money at PC to gain 30 seconds doesn't seem worth the time.

 

[Karadjgne]

Justification. It's almost as bad as Karma. Walk in, push button, sit down, adjust kb-mouse-coffee cup. Get comfy. Stick headphones on head and adjust mic. Oh look, it's booted already. Coming from a HDD and 3+ minute boot times, anything resembling 30 seconds or less is a miricle in itself.
Hunting a 5 second or better boot by spending large amounts of cash on the fastest performance components, followed by shutting down everything and anything normally useful is not really anything different than chasing 6GHz+ with LN2.

 

[stdragon]

It's not just about boot times; it's about overall responsiveness of the OS. Succinctly put, a user should never have to wait on the system! Life is far too short for the constant micro-interruption via lag, waits, and bothersome dialog windows that highjack the keyboard focus.

In a perfect computing world the OS would boot and run with the speed of game console cartridge. Turn it on and it's all there.

System on a chip?! Actually yeah! If Win10 ran on custom NAND flash with ASICS on a PCIe card, it would find a home in my PC. Though honestly would be better served in a laptop.

 

[punkncat]

Is this some manner of surprise to some?

In essence, select a nice SSD. Go in and turn off any extraneous start up programs and boot options. Turn on 'fast boot' with enabled hardware and there you are. I have a 4th gen i5 that has had ~6 second power button to desktop times since I built it. I didn't think it was some secret.....

 

[stuffwhy]

I'm very interested in fast booting computers, but it seems like a pretty extreme configuration to achieve this time. Many of these decisions would affect a daily user or even an enthusiast in their general usage of the computer, wouldn't they? And then you start adding back in a thing here, a thing there, 0.1 seconds more, more, then you're back to a (whopping!) ten seconds or so. I think 4.9 seconds occupies an odd niche where you're close to instant but at the same time not experientially much closer than ten or so. I'll still be following some of the tips to shave time off my boot.

 

[geekinchief]

I just read the article 3 times and either I fail comprehension or the article fails to mention how the times were calculated?

We wanted to include POST time in this challenge, because yes, different motherboards vary so it matters a lot. So we did a frame-by-frame analysis of a video.Yes, not everyone will want this ASRock motherboard and that's ok, but we're trying to show what's possible.

 

[geekinchief]

I'm very interested in fast booting computers, but it seems like a pretty extreme configuration to achieve this time. Many of these decisions would affect a daily user or even an enthusiast in their general usage of the computer, wouldn't they? And then you start adding back in a thing here, a thing there, 0.1 seconds more, more, then you're back to a (whopping!) ten seconds or so. I think 4.9 seconds occupies an odd niche where you're close to instant but at the same time not experientially much closer than ten or so. I'll still be following some of the tips to shave time off my boot.

I like to think of this as akin to ripping the seats out of your race car to beat Vin Diesel in a street race. Of course, you wouldn't drive your kids to school without putting the seats back in.

 

[frzen420]

6 seconds with a 4 year old Alienware laptop and it's SSD as a data drive instead of cache drive... With a newer SSD I can probably beat your 5 seconds by a second

 

[cat1092]

All of that looks great (& is), but that 'FastBoot' setting is a gimmick for slow computers with HDD's, to make customers think these 'boots' faster (when really brought out of a semi hibernation). With it enabled (except for these tests), the hardware doesn't get needed rest, just look at all of the notebooks with now-dead (or near so) batteries since the release of Windows 8 in late 2012, some as recent as 2015-16 releases. Plus the heat has likely began to erode trim near the bezel, probably more so on low end offerings, yet that's not cast into stone.

The proof is there on a notebook, feel around the bezel near power button, it's always warm......as is the battery, CPU/RAM, wireless card & who knows what else? Not to mention to have FastBoot, hibernation has to be enabled, a sure-fire SSD killer, as this creates massive writes when turned off.....not shut down. One can build two different systems at the same time, with same hardware & about the same usage time & guess what?

The PC with FastBoot will have lots more writes (eating into TBW written) versus the one by opening cmd as Admin & typing 'powercfg -h off' & press enter & likely other signs of wear. It's OK though, Intel will be very happy to sell a new 1TB Optane SSD come 5-6 years. They won't honor a warranty within the 5 year timeframe with excessive TBW on the drive, is FastBoot worth that extra 2-3 seconds.....& several hundred dollars? For the home/business usage, I'd wager not.

For these sites which gets a lot of free hardware to test/publish benchmarks, nothing to lose. For most, some lucky employees gets new hardware on a rotational basis......or the office rarely buys hardware.

With these builds, nothing to prove, disable the Fastboot/hibernation gimmick altogether & let the good times roll. By the time one flips the power button of the mouse (if performed last), the system should be up anyway. An extra 2.5-3 seconds (with PCIe 3.0 or Ultra M.2 NVMe defaults) is worth the wait, far from the days of spinners which even on a good day (with recent hardware) & 16-32GB Intel Optane cache drive, or using the FastBoot gimmick, as noted with the 500GB WD Blue, middle of the road HDD still can clean boot Windows in less than 40 seconds, under a minute with most any other cache drive (such as 32GB mSATA or other small SSD installed for the purpose.

Cat

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

While it's neat that some computers can be made to boot from scratch very quickly, I must have missed the part where everyone went back to booting machines from scratch each time they sat down to use them. What happened to just letting the machine enter a sleep state or putting it to sleep manually, rather than shutting it down?

 

[barryeslick]

My 3rd Gen DELL i3 was becoming a total dog - then I installed a Samsung 860 EVO. Now it is a pleasure to use. Off to boot to password screen is just 9.8 seconds.
But, my next laptop will have an NVME SSD and as much memory as I can afford.

 

[Colif]

All of that looks great (& is), but that 'FastBoot' setting is a gimmick for slow computers with HDD's, to make customers think these 'boots' faster (when really brought out of a semi hibernation). With it enabled (except for these tests), the hardware doesn't get needed rest, just look at all of the notebooks with now-dead (or near so) batteries since the release of Windows 8 in late 2012, some as recent as 2015-16 releases. Plus the heat has likely began to erode trim near the bezel, probably more so on low end offerings, yet that's not cast into stone.

The proof is there on a notebook, feel around the bezel near power button, it's always warm......as is the battery, CPU/RAM, wireless card & who knows what else? Not to mention to have FastBoot, hibernation has to be enabled, a sure-fire SSD killer, as this creates massive writes when turned off.....not shut down. One can build two different systems at the same time, with same hardware & about the same usage time & guess what?

The PC with FastBoot will have lots more writes (eating into TBW written) versus the one by opening cmd as Admin & typing 'powercfg -h off' & press enter & likely other signs of wear. It's OK though, Intel will be very happy to sell a new 1TB Optane SSD come 5-6 years. They won't honor a warranty within the 5 year timeframe with excessive TBW on the drive, is FastBoot worth that extra 2-3 seconds.....& several hundred dollars? For the home/business usage, I'd wager not.

For these sites which gets a lot of free hardware to test/publish benchmarks, nothing to lose. For most, some lucky employees gets new hardware on a rotational basis......or the office rarely buys hardware.

With these builds, nothing to prove, disable the Fastboot/hibernation gimmick altogether & let the good times roll. By the time one flips the power button of the mouse (if performed last), the system should be up anyway. An extra 2.5-3 seconds (with PCIe 3.0 or Ultra M.2 NVMe defaults) is worth the wait, far from the days of spinners which even on a good day (with recent hardware) & 16-32GB Intel Optane cache drive, or using the FastBoot gimmick, as noted with the 500GB WD Blue, middle of the road HDD still can clean boot Windows in less than 40 seconds, under a minute with most any other cache drive (such as 32GB mSATA or other small SSD installed for the purpose.

Cat

The fast boot mentioned in the article is a bios feature on many boards that either doesn't run the memory check on startup or sets bios to ignore all other USB devices at boot except the KB/Mouse. This does speed up boot

The Fast startup you are talking about is built into windows 10 and is, as you say, mainly for people with hdd. It doesn't help on ssd.

Two different functions, only related by names.

 

[flavio.schrenk]

so my 7820x, 2x8GB 3600MHz, 500GB 960 evo pc takes 27s

 

[Peter Martin]

My son’s asus has them beat. Turn it on and its up almost instantly. i was shocked, seriously I thought it wasn't working correctly, that it wasn't possible. it was/is

my hp 15 notebook takes 26 seconds from cold start to login, my sata is so weak it can't even bench the 850 Pro 500 GB properly on userbenchmarks.com

 

[Karadjgne]

Of course that's assuming you don't have an older pc. There's lots of issues with motherboard 'fast boot' and compatability with older gen cpus and newer gen gpus and the whole legacy-hybrid-uefi bios debacle.

 

[kashifnawaz85]

I'll try my i5 with 850 Evo.

 

[kashifnawaz85]

I'll try with my HP i5 and Samsung Evo 850.

 

[eddietorresjrgmail]

I boot 2.2 sec
leave in sleep mode all the time. lol

 

[Tanyac]

4.93... An impossible dream

With ASRock Z370 boards, a Samsung 970 Pro 1TB and nothing other than keyboard and mouse I can't beat 10 seconds. 6 of that is waiting for POST.

With MSI Z370 boards w/I5-8600K and a Samsung 970 Pro 1TB I can't been 18 seconds, 13 of which is waiting for POST.

My main PC - with an MSI X299 xpower gaming AC and I9-7900X with a Samsung 970 Pro 1TB and nothing else but mouse and keyboard I can't beat 42 seconds. 35 of that is waiting for POST. After spending weeks with MSI community members no cause could be identified and MSI could care less.

I remember seeing an 80386 boot in 3.5 seconds... The good old days

 

[stdragon]

4.93... An impossible dream

With ASRock Z370 boards, a Samsung 970 Pro 1TB and nothing other than keyboard and mouse I can't beat 10 seconds. 6 of that is waiting for POST.

With MSI Z370 boards w/I5-8600K and a Samsung 970 Pro 1TB I can't been 18 seconds, 13 of which is waiting for POST.

My main PC - with an MSI X299 xpower gaming AC and I9-7900X with a Samsung 970 Pro 1TB and nothing else but mouse and keyboard I can't beat 42 seconds. 35 of that is waiting for POST. After spending weeks with MSI community members no cause could be identified and MSI could care less.

I remember seeing an 80386 boot in 3.5 seconds... The good old days

Basically, turn off any feature in BIOS that's "Auto Detect". Detecting of devices for enumeration is what adds to the long POST times. For example, if you're not using SATA2, SATA3 ports, explicitly set those to disable (if the option exists to do so)

 

[Tanyac]

4.93... An impossible dream

With ASRock Z370 boards, a Samsung 970 Pro 1TB and nothing other than keyboard and mouse I can't beat 10 seconds. 6 of that is waiting for POST.

With MSI Z370 boards w/I5-8600K and a Samsung 970 Pro 1TB I can't been 18 seconds, 13 of which is waiting for POST.

My main PC - with an MSI X299 xpower gaming AC and I9-7900X with a Samsung 970 Pro 1TB and nothing else but mouse and keyboard I can't beat 42 seconds. 35 of that is waiting for POST. After spending weeks with MSI community members no cause could be identified and MSI could care less.

I remember seeing an 80386 boot in 3.5 seconds... The good old days

Basically, turn off any feature in BIOS that's "Auto Detect". Detecting of devices for enumeration is what adds to the long POST times. For example, if you're not using SATA2, SATA3 ports, explicitly set those to disable (if the option exists to do so)

Thanks for the tip. Have been through several BIOS versions and tried things like that. At one point I had all drives disabled and removed. The only drive on the system was the M.2 boot drive... Fast Boot, And MSI Fast boot didn't make any difference either.

Anyway, MSI aren't interested in solving the problem. As soon as I can find a board with everything this one has, at a price I can afford I'll be dumping MSI. My options are Limited because ASRock has no presence here in Australia and will not honor warranties at all. Sorry... Off topic

 

[woahwoahwilly]

My laptop boots in 3.5 seconds.

 

[KD_Gaming]

I'm forever screwed in competing for boot times as I run a raid card which has additional Startup time. Not that it really matters anyway..

 

[RohanWillAnswer]

"We got our fastest result with a single, 4GB DIMM, which is less RAM than anyone should use in 2018".

Isn't RAM check a big part of the slow startup?