Can someone explain why my laptop starts up so much faster with Windows 8?

Caporegime
Joined
29 Jul 2011
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In acme's chair.
So I bought my laptop probably 3 and a half years ago, and it came with Windows 7 Home Premium x64 pre-installed.

Naturally it came with a load of bloatware and rubbish so I saved time by re-installing the OS immediately. With Windows 7 installed, it would take anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes to boot into the OS, the ridiculous 2 minutes being after the service pack(s) arrived. :(

I did re-install Windows 7 on a number of occasions for various reasons as well, so it wasn't a bad OS install.

Now that I have Windows 8 Pro installed, it boots so fast it's unbelievable. I'm sitting at the desktop, with a perfectly usable laptop in under 10 seconds! My desktop (sig) doesn't get into Windows 7 anywhere near that fast even! :eek:

The spec of the laptop is nothing amazing these days, it was decent back in '09:

AMD Turion II M620 2.5GHz
4GB 800MHz DDR2
Radeon HD4530M 512MB
320GB Toshiba MK3276GSX 5.4K RPM

How exactly does Windows 8 work differently, that allows my laptop to be up and ready to go so much faster?

Cheers :)
 
Associate
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24 Apr 2009
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Aberdeen, Scotland
Most of the small changes in W8 got little to no publicity. Many small improvements have a cumulative effect.

For example, MS is still developing readyboost. In W8, because your machine is technically running the same session when you shutdown, the cache isn't wiped so you can actually use it and get a real performance gain at startup on laptop with an empty sd slot :)

Once we've all got ssds it won't matter, but there are plenty old laptops like yours that can benifit.
 
Soldato
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27 Nov 2005
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Guernsey
Yes the desktop may boot fast..

But all the little startup programs like steam/Origin/Aida64/etc/etc still take a fair time to load up after windows has loaded
 
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Soldato
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hybrid shutdown seem to wear a SSD out slightly quicker.

example with hybrid shutdown enabled my wear level count went up by 2 (from 92 to 94) after 2 days. with hybrid shutdown disabled my wear level count only went up by 1 (from 94 to 95) after 6 days.

this is with shutting down everyday
 
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Caporegime
OP
Joined
29 Jul 2011
Posts
36,339
Location
In acme's chair.
Ah cheers guys :)

That makes sense.

As for the SSD wear comment gareth170, thanks for letting me know :)

I'm sure it won't make much difference to me if I install Windows 8 on my desktop though, cos it only gets turned off once every week or two :p
 
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