Everyday, we rely on technology in many aspect of our life. That’s includes to get things done properly, entertaining us or even making us looks fair. It is not a secret that we have some kind of favoritism toward any product that produce highly satisfaction to us in any kind of form, such as design, color, the ecosystem, coolness, usefulness or simpleness.
We used to memorize the favorite brand, but we tend to forgot the technology behind that product. To some extent we don’t even want to know or come to our mind, who contribute or create the technology behind it? Haven’t you? Don’t feel bad though, that is just too normal for us as human.
Ever head of this guys called, Aaron Dietrich? Nope, some to you I guess. Ever heard of Microsoft? Yes. Ever heard of Windows 7? Yes, I use them, but why, does he invent it? Nope, this is not the guys that single handed creating Windows 7. But the works from Aaron and his team has leads to faster Windows 7 start or ‘boot’ as some of us more familiar with. He is the team lead that tasked to give Windows 7 start a boost.
Usually, the first things comes to mind about Windows operating system is sluggish, especially the start up time. Yes, damn slow to start after install it with may app or running for 2-4 years. There is joke that the first thing, you should do once come to the office, is turn on the Windows running computer and only then make some coffee, because making coffee is faster than Windows.
Aaronn Dietrich is featuring in Microsoft’s story titled The Man Behind the Windows 7’s Fast Start. I stumbled that story recently and found it quite interesting. It is an interview with this guy that cover variety of topic which included the roles, team work and Windows 7 itself.
So what made Windows 7 to start fast? According to Aaron “There were a couple of key features that allowed us to get better boot times. The first was we introduced what we call the fast boot feature, which allows some parts of boot to happen in the background while Windows is discovering and initializing devices. That helped us gain up to 25 percent of our boot time over Windows Vista, depending on the hardware.The other big one was that we significantly reduced the size of the operating system required to be read from disk in order to boot. Whereas Windows Vista required somewhere on the order of 220 to 240 megabytes of operating system code to boot, Windows 7 requires anywhere from 140 to 180 megabytes, depending on the configuration of the system”
The explanation made the feature sound simple but I believe it is hard to be implemented. Otherwise Vista is not such a disaster to Microsoft. You see, even the boot require 140 to 180 Mb amount of code, which is equivalent to 28-36 songs. Now I start to wonder, do they test Vista’s startup time before it was released? For Windows 7, what happen after additional software and hardware were added, does that grows the amount of code as well?
Need sometime to figure that out. At the mean time, please read the full interview.
