Windows 8 will have a boot time of less than 2 seconds. From survey, Microsoft showed that lot of PC users prefer to shut down Windows completely than putting their PCs into sleep or hibernation mode. It might have something to do with people’s preference of totally shutting down their PCs, so that no power is consumed.
Three major aims that Microsoft worked on for improving boot time was:
Zero watt power effectively to be used when system is switched off.
Fresh user session must be there after every boot.
Time gap between pressing power button and using the PC should be the minimum.
How Does Windows 8 Boots Faster
In Windows 8, instead of closing both user and kernel session while hibernating like in earlier versions of Windows, here the kernel session is saved and kept in a ‘hiber file’ which is much smaller as compared to the usual way to save both the sessions.
Hence as compared to the full hibernation mode, which takes a huge amount of memory pages, reading a small size hiber file and reinitializing drivers is much quicker. The size of hiber file is typically 75% of physical RAM available.
In a multi core system, the task of reading the hiber file can be done in parallel. Driver files are re-initialized in the fast reboot mode. Users can also choose to do a cold reboot for freshening up the device and drivers.
Microsoft is claiming that the boot time is 30-70% faster as compared to most systems.