VR-Zone

Can't afford to upgrade to an SSD to reduce your boot times? No worries, Microsoft has you covered, or at least that's what the company is claiming, although you'll have to upgrade to Windows 8 to reap the benefit of 30 to 70 percent faster boot times.

As you might've already gathered, we're not talking about cold boot here though, as Microsoft has come up with a new way to nearly power off your system. Although the company doesn't seem to have come up with a proper name for it yet, the MSDN blog talks about "fast startup" as something of a hybrid between hibernation and a cold boot.

As such, the system closes all the user sessions when you power off the system, just like it does today in Windows 7, but the trick here is that the kernel session is put into hibernation mode. This creates a much less hibernation data and this is stored onto the hard drive and as such it's quicker to store. This file is then read when the system is powered on and reduces the overall boot time, much like hibernation does today, but with fewer things being loaded.

Another added benefit for desktop systems in Windows 8 is hybrid sleep which puts the system to sleep (store settings in RAM), but with the added benefit of also storing a copy of the data on the hard drive. Why is this useful? Well, in case of a power failure, you'll still be able to resume the system instead of having to do a cold boot.

The question is how much added benefit this will bring to users of SSDs or the various SSD caching technologies which are starting to become a standard feature on higher-end notebooks. UEFI will also help reduce the overall boot time by handling things like AHCI which when enabled on systems with BIOS tend to increase the POST time. Click on the source link for a short video from Microsoft demoing Windows 8 fast startup.

Source: MSDN blog