Boot times comparison?


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I've tried to measure the boot times from the moment I hit "enter" in the OS chooser until the desktop appears for all three OSs (Win7, OS X and the latest ubuntu)

and the results are these:

- Mac OS X takes a little under 30 seconds until the desktop is fully shown. But let's say 30 seconds since it took a bit for skype to appear :p

- Ubuntu surprised me. This is my less accurate measure, since I had to pause the timer to enter my account credentials, and then started the timer again the moment i hit enter. With that in mind, the cumulative time (log-in exluded) was a little over 30 seconds.

- Windows 7, from the moment i hit "enter" in grub until the welcome screen appears, takes exactly 30 seconds. I configured the automatic login, and it takes another 20 for the desktop to be fully loaded.

Am I alone here and Im getting abnormal boot times, or does windows really take "that" long? Although I have to say, once the desktop is loaded, in ubuntu it takes like a year for firefox to load, and it is almost instant in windows7.

Both windows7 and ubuntu are 64-bits, and os x.. I really dont know, I think that the kernel is the only 64 bit enabled thing there.

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Well, the apple hardware is made for the Mac, so it has an advantage there.

You mean Mac OS is made for Apple hardware.

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I'm not on apple hardware, and it still takes 30 seconds to get me to a fully loaded desktop. That's beyond the point anyway, an intel processor wont work faster on a mac just because it is on a mac. OS x is made for apple hardware, that's right, but considering "apple hardware" now means a PC with EFI, the argument doesnt hold much these days.

My point was, I've read it takes people 28 seconds to get to the desktop in windows7, and that's not the case for me. And yet I'm still under the impression that win7 boots faster than ever before.

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Boot times can depend on where the partitions are physically located on your hard disk. The outer tracks are faster than the inner tracks. Since the OS has to load everything from the HDD this could affect your tests.

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haha dude, 30 seconds is pretty good. remember when windows me took about 2 minutes ;)

I mean 30 seconds for os x and ubuntu, but around 50 for windows (to the desktop. to the welcome screen it's definitely 30 seconds)

Boot times can depend on where the partitions are physically located on your hard disk. The outer tracks are faster than the inner tracks. Since the OS has to load everything from the HDD this could affect your tests.

mmm I'll have that in mind :D

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- Mac OS X takes a little under 30 seconds until the desktop is fully shown. But let's say 30 seconds since it took a bit for skype to appear :p

Hmm, my Macbook Pro takes less than 20 to hit the desktop with Adium etc. already running (7200 2.5" spinner I put in myself) - what kind of system are you running?

(I used Genius to defrag the drive + move the data to optimize the performance tho' so this might have some effect)

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Well, the apple hardware is made for the Mac, so it has an advantage there.

Newsflash, mac has the same hardware as a normal PC, just the housing looks more design and it has os-x :)

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Disable all services which mac doesn't have and iot will boot faster

First of all you need to do this compression right.Leopard's boot time should be coopered with vista.and W7 with snow leopard.And their are plenty of ways with which you can boot leopard faster too.

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Hmm, my Macbook Pro takes less than 20 to hit the desktop with Adium etc. already running (7200 2.5" spinner I put in myself) - what kind of system are you running?

(I used Genius to defrag the drive + move the data to optimize the performance tho' so this might have some effect)

I'm on a regular pc. On the imac it definitely flies, but I'm not installing win7 there to compare.

My system is a q6600 @ 2.4Ghz with 4GB ram, the harddrives are 7200RPM, western digital.

Though I guess I have windows7 on an unfortunate partition. I have both osx and linux on another hard drive (exact same specs and size, but for some reason the tests always yield slightly better results).

Once windows7 is released I will try use RAID and use the second hard drive as a mirror to boost performance, but I dont know if I can have both windows and linux on the same RAID since apparently my RAID is kinda fake.

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I can't say how long Windows 7 RC booted for me (had to uninstall it due to no free hard disk space ;)), but it was fast as hell - it booted before my router connected to ADSL :p

It's a lot faster than Windows XP (both using the same amount of software) and when 7 shows the desktop it's already usable, while on XP you still have to wait before doing anything. And Firefox starts up like 80% faster on 7 :)

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I've got a HP G70-120EA running win7 and I'm sure it boots in way under 50 secs! I have not restarted it for quite a while though.

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