Posted 11/14/08 at 01:20:56 PM by Paul Lilly

Power users have long dreamed of the day when hitting their PC's power button would result in an instantaneous boot. Technologies like SplashTop's Instant-On Linux-based OS have brought this concept closer to reality, but unlike the Instant-On OS, which works on a flash chip embedded on select motherboards giving users quick access to basic online tasks, Asrock's new Instant Boot feature promises super speedy boot times into Windows to the tune of just 3-4 seconds and has posted a video to prove it.

Impossible? Well, yes, but Asrock's creative approach puts a unique spin on shutting down and turning on your system. After installing the Instant Boot application on a compatible Asrock motherboard, shutting down your PC triggers a shutdown and reboot process that ultimately puts your system in a Hibernate or Standby state. The next time you hit the power button, you'll be up and running in as little as 3 seconds.

The obvious question is why not just put your system in Standby or Hibernate in the first place, and according to Asrock, Instant Boot's advantages include a less cluttered OS from a clean boot with no "accumulated garbage data," nor will you lose any data during a power outage. Whether or not Instant Boot becomes an instant hit is yet to be determined, but kudos to Asrock for thinking outside of the box.

Hit the jump and tell us what you think of this new technology.

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11

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system, motherboard, hardware, bios, boot, instant on, asrock

Posted 11/06/08 at 09:00:33 AM by Alex Castle

One of the most frustrating experiences you can have as a PC user is when something just won’t work. Maybe it’s a game that blacks out after the title screen, or an app that refuses to launch when you tell it to, but in any case it doesn’t give you much of a clue what’s going wrong, and it’s enough to make you want to pull your hair out.

One possible cause of these mysterious crashes is interference with one of your computer’s background processes. Unfortunately, a whole host of them start with Windows, so it can be tricky to figure out if they’re causing a problem, and if so, which one.

In this article, we’ll show you how to use a clean boot to identify harmful program interactions. A clean boot is a boot where no unnecessary background processes launch at startup. Some functionality of the computer may be lost while performing a clean boot, but it’s easily reversible and a powerful diagnostic technique.

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6

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windows, windows xp, troubleshooting, Windows Vista, how_to, boot, clean boot

Posted 09/15/08 at 06:35:51 PM by The Maximum PC Staff

I’m trying to upgrade my boot disc drive, which uses XP as the OS. I’d failed twice and hen turned to Norton Ghost 12 to copy my C drive to my new disc. During the clone, everything seemed to be working until about 70 percent of the way through the procedure. At that point, a message appeared stating that my computer was trying to communicate with Microsoft. After about two minutes another message appeared stating that the attempt to communicate failed. Then the computer crashed.

I had some difficulty rebooting and then found that XP failed to recognize the new disc drive. It took me some time to figure out that this drive had to be reformatted. I’ve upgraded discs before but never encountered difficulties like this. I called Microsoft and they suggested I buy a copy of Vista and rebuild from scratch. I don’t want to do this. Am I missing something?

Begun, the Clone Wars have. Answers after the jump.

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4

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windows, XP, ask the doctor, Norton Ghost, boot, bootable cd-rom, clone, reformatting, cloning wars

Posted 09/28/05 at 04:00:31 PM by Maximum PC

By Logan Decker
If Windows doesn’t feel like starting up and your files are being held hostage, booting into a DOS environment with a floppy disk or floppy emulation won’t do you much good because you can’t access NTFS partitions.

This floppy-less method gives you access to all your files (provided the problem isn’t with your drive; if it is, you have our sympathies).

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0

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how_to, boot, bootable, bootable cd-rom, cd-rom