Australian Media Center Community: Why Windows 8 Will Boot Much Faster

If there’s one thing that drives us crazy it’s a slow-booting Windows system. That’s why for Windows 8, Microsoft went back to the drawing board to redesign the boot process for speed.

The key difference for Windows 8 is that as with Windows 7, the user session is closed, but instead of closing the kernel session, it's hibernated. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller which takes substantially less time to write to disk. If you’re not familiar with hibernation, it's 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. Using this technique with boot gives a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems - 30-70% faster on most systems tested:

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It’s faster because resuming the hibernated system session is comparatively less work than doing a full system initialization, but it’s also faster because Microsoft has added a new multi-phase resume capability, which is able to use all of the cores in a multi-core system in parallel, to split the work of reading from the hiberfile and decompressing the contents. For those who prefer hibernating, this also results in faster resumes from hibernate as well.

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Another important thing to note about Windows 8’s fast startup mode is that whilst it won't do a full “Plug & Play” enumeration of all drivers, it will still initialize drivers in this mode. Those 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 startup 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 should yeild significant improvements which can be seen in the video below.



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