Why do people obsess about Boot up times?

JRS

JRS

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Shaving the odd second off, no big deal.

Dealing with something still on an ancient spinning rust drive that takes three minutes to give you a usable desktop, rather larger deal.
 
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A modern mech HDD on clean install will not take 3 mins more like 30-50secs.

Fastest boot I ever had was about 5-6secs on Win 8 or 8.1, it is on slower on Win 10 as by design it loads lot of stuff then lets you use it (you can disable this).
 
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Since near everyone has an SSD now for o/s i don't really see it come up much.

I mostly cold boot so going from 20s to near 10s would be great imo.

But 5% overclock on GPU is of no interest to me, yet others would relish it.

Same can be applied to quiet builds. Some want it, others don't care due to headphones being used.

My "but why?" is a PSU shroud and cable hiding. All personal preference. But each to their own :)
 
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I remember when I used to be able to go and make a cup of tea while the PC booted. Modern hardware is so much better. The only real difference would be with non-volatile memory and instant on, a few more seconds off an already fast boot doesn't really excite me.
 
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A modern mech HDD on clean install will not take 3 mins more like 30-50secs.

Fastest boot I ever had was about 5-6secs on Win 8 or 8.1, it is on slower on Win 10 as by design it loads lot of stuff then lets you use it (you can disable this).

So on a non clean install 1+ minutes. Nobody wants to wait that time for a device to boot.
 
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I used to obsess about it being quiet to the point of using solid-state storage only! Nothing worse than spinning drives and fan noise :p

Once you reach the point of diminishing returns, well, it's exactly that. But that goes for overclocking CPU, GPU and RAM, boot speed, loading times in games, etc.
 
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So on a non clean install 1+ minutes. Nobody wants to wait that time for a device to boot.

Again that has absolutely nothing to do with what he said or I replied to and some people do wait that long, you think most people outside this forum and the likes even know what an SSD is and some SSD installs will now also be bogged down and slow, easily 30-45secs most will be lucky if they boot no a clean install in 20secs.

To get as fast as possible you need full UEFI install (not Legacy Bios) with CSM disabled and a Secure boot/GPT install with Fast Boot enabled, again most will not be.
 
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It’s not just about boot times, having windows on a fast SSD or NVME is a world of difference in general usability compared to a mechanical hard drive. It just works much faster, much snappier and faster responses.
 
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Does getting to the desktop a few seconds quicker make any difference?
Booting isn't so much of a hassle, it's more the hassle when you have to reboot after installing or updating something, especially when there are several reboots in the sequence, when all you want to is just get on with the game or app.
But as above, it's often a lot longer than just "a few seconds", especially on older drives. SSDs make a noticable difference, and boot times are just one of those that most people notice... unless you play Star Citizen, in which case SSD is pretty much a requirement!
 
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I don't think anyone obsesses over it until they've made a cup of tea before their PC has finished loading into Windows (literally, i remember those times). In the age of SSD load times you'd be anal worrying over a second or two.
 
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Modern SSD even the cheapest and slowest drives available are so fast that it's no real noticeable difference in load times compared to the fastest and most expensive unless you literally timed them both or had them side by side. Yes it may be a second but that's literally nothing you will miss.

I buy Samsung which tend to be one of the fastest. Not for their speed but for their longevity and reliability. I don't really care they are x% faster than SanDisk I care that once I've bought it, it will last me many years. I don't require massive amounts of storage on my gaming desktop having 1TB or 2TB will be more than enough I have an unraid server for all my media and that had multiple large mechanical drives and small cheap SSD as cache drives and you can get them for around £100 per tb plus or minus £30 depending on 2.5" or nvme.

The main game I play is competitive FPS and the game won't actually start until everyone has loaded in. So what difference does load speed make for me in reality is nothing. I load in faster so I can then wait for the Russian on a 5400rpm drive from 12 years ago to load in.

Either buy the cheapest SSD in your size and replace every 3-5 years or buy slightly more expensive like Samsung if you want to keep for a decade.

Next gen SSD will make zero real world difference until windows 11 comes out.
 
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I own both HDD's and SSD's in use on various computers.

My Laptop and HTPC both boot from SSD's

My workstation boots from a 2TB Western Digital Enterprise HDD, however I also use combined with an SSD for caching. Computer is very fast once it's settled down, I normally standby when not in use. I also use Enterprise HDD's for data.

Many people are use to consumer HDD's that are slow compared to enterprise HDD's. Enterprise HDD's are very high quality and trust them for large data writes over SSD's.

Overlooked is large amounts of RAM, as Windows will cache files in standby memory, standby memory is faster then any SSD. My workstation with the HDD's has 64GB.
 
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