Posted 09/04/08 at 09:58:05 PM by Mark Edward Soper

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
• BIOS 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?" Give us your thoughts after the jump.

Read More

Comments 

10

TAGS 

microsoft, operating system, windows 7, e7, Engineering Windows 7

Posted 08/29/08 at 10:44:02 AM by Mark Edward Soper

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

To learn more about how Microsoft is performance-testing Windows 7, and how your comments can help shape Windows 7, join us after the jump.

Read More

Comments 

6

TAGS 

microsoft, operating system, windows 7, e7, Engineering Windows 7