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Comment by acheron | Hacker News Reader

One that got worse and then better again at least in my experience is boot up time. Old computers running MS-DOS I remember booting up very quickly (unless you waited for the full memory self test), then for quite a long time it took forever to get into Windows no matter what you did to try to speed it up. More recently things start up pretty quickly again; I think it's mainly hardware (solid-state disks being the major improvement), but I do think Windows seems to do a little better software-wise too. (Linux and BSD I haven't used as a desktop in a very long time so I'm not sure where those are now. OSX I don't have much of a sense of, partly because it just doesn't need to fully reboot as often as Windows.)

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>but I do think Windows seems to do a little better software-wise too

Windows 10 does a little trick to speed up boot - when you perform a shutdown, Windows 10 saves a mini-hibernation image to the hibernation file. When you perform normal boot, it can start up quite fast[1]. This gives noticeably shorter boot time especially on spinning rust drives (i know, i know, $CURRENT_YEAR). However if you perform a "reboot" instead of "shutdown + power on", you'll get the full length boot of notably longer time.

[1] assuming the hardware setup is sufficently unchanged

This exact hibernation feature is what I feel is making my shutdowns slower!

I've been rocking an M.2 ssd for quite some time now and Win10 _always_ takes a considerate 1-2 minutes to shutdown.

I get 11 seconds to shut down, 11 seconds to boot, on a 256G NVMe ssd. I'm curious what's going on on your machine.

Wouldn't even dumping literally all ram contents take only a few seconds on an NVMe drive? It's probably something else.

That's the first thing I disable after ever Windows 10 update (it keeps getting reset for some reason). If you have a dual-boot setup, it can result in a corrupted partition if you try to access your Windows 10 partition from another OS when fast start is enabled.

I run separate partitions for OS and storage on dual boot machines, so I can avoid the risk of one OS corrupting the other.

Nope; if the hibernated OS has the storage volume mounted, and you edit that volume in another OS, separate or not you will end up with corruption, just as if two machines had mounted it simultaneously.

I feel that (partially due to this hibernation file, partially due to SSDs) that Windows boots are actually faster than ever now. Even a reboot seems to take under 30 seconds. I remember just the RAM test on my Pentium 1 was several minutes, and the boot time was a few more often

May be, but Ubuntu still boots faster in the same hardware, doing a full boot sequence.

My linux laptop sleeps so efficiently that I just never shut it down. It can sleep for days, at which point I've almost definitely plugged it into something. It sleeps in my backpack with no temperature issues. The SSD makes working with traditionally quite heavy tooling lightning fast.

Likewise, my Windows machine hibernates so fast that boot time feels like I'm just waking it up from sleep.

Thanks to the advent of SSDs, applications are also quite peppy to startup. Music, movies, pictures, all so fast to use.

Still hasn't caught up to a c64. A flick, loaded.

If you keep your computer in suspend-to-RAM mode, it will do that and still use less power over time than the C=64 and its damn power brick.

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