Engineering Windows 7 for Faster Boot Performance

Mark Edward Soper — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:58:05 -0500

What can be done to help Windows 7 boot faster? According to Windows Fundamentals feature team leader Michael Fortin, blogging on the e7 (Engineering Windows 7) blog. a clean install isn't necessarily the way to go:

As the system [running Windows Vista SP1] arrived to us, the off-the-shelf configuration had a ~45 second boot time. Performing a clean install of Vista SP1 on the same system produced a consistent ~23 second boot time. Of course, being a clean install, there were many fewer processes, services and a slightly different set of drivers (mostly the versions were different). However, we were able to take the off-the-shelf configuration and optimize it to produce a consistent boot time of ~21 seconds, ~2 seconds faster than the clean install because some driver/BIOS changes could be made in the optimized configuration.

Fortin identifies a number of design goals for Windows 7 to help it achieve a high percentage of "very good" boot times (under 15 seconds), including:

Reducing the number of system services
Reducing the demand that system services make on CPU, disk, and memory resources
Device and driver optimization
Improving parallelism of driver initialization (enabling multiple drivers to be installed at the same time)
Faster prefeching optimized for both traditional and SSD hard disks

Fortin's comments suggest that Microsoft is working very closely with system vendors to help assure that Windows 7 works well in typical preconfigured systems. Hopefully, Microsoft has learned a lot from the vast difference in performance between clean installs of Windows Vista and systems cluttered with OEM products not optimized for Vista.

Don't want to wait for Windows 7 to get faster boot times? Fortin also discusses analyzing systems with the Windows Performance Toolkit for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, available here.

How do you define fast boot time? When is a system "ready to go?" Hit the comment button and give us your thoughts.

Illustration adapted from Windows 7 logo courtesy of ArsTechnica.

A Closer Look at Windows 7's Approach to System Performance

Mark Edward Soper — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 10:44:02 -0500

The Engineering Windows 7 (aka "e7") blog at MSDN is providing us with a useful look at how the performance of Windows 7 is being analyzed in this week's blog post. So, what are the major subsystems being analyzed? Some of them include:

Memory usage: trying to balance time versus space (disk, memory)
CPU utilization: keep it as low as possible to improve multi-user scenarios and reduce power consumption
Disk I/O: reading, writing, paging performance for both traditional and solid-state drives
Boot, Shutdown, Standby/Resume: working with system vendors to make these operations as fast as possible
Base system: balancing "on-demand" loading of resources with the need to keep performance at as high a level as possible
Disk footprint: working with the space demands of device drivers, help system, optional components, diagnostics, and logging information

What hardware is Microsoft using? In contrast to the popular view that Redmond tests Windows only on the fastest hardware, the Engineering Windows 7 group is using a variety of 32-bit and 64-bit platforms with varying amounts of RAM (1,2, and 4GB), hard disk types (5400 rpm, 7200 rpm, and solid state), and various Intel and AMD processors for performance measurements, and is also using conditional code to customize Windows for particular hardware. And, if you wondered if you should opt into the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program, the e7 folks point out that it provides useful (and anonymous) data on how systems in the field are working.

One of Microsoft's goals in setting up the e7 blog was to get a wide range of user comments to help shape the direction of Windows 7, and with over 60 comments on this blog post alone, it's working. These comments aren't fanboy "Windows rules" or "Windows sucks"-level invective, either. They're thoughtful suggestions on everything from how customizable the user interface should be to how to improve the Registry. If you're concerned about the future of Windows, you should stop by and have a look - regularly - and add your two cents through their comments feature (as well as ours).

Windows 7 logo courtesy of ArsTechnica.

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Engineering Windows 7 for Faster Boot Performance

A Closer Look at Windows 7's Approach to System Performance