Everything, Everything

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Bootup
Monday 16th April, 2007 11:19 Comments: 0
My boss was complaining about Windows (he has a Mac at home). I can understand his frustration at the software he wanted to use not being able to find the dongle that came with it, but I must admit I'm not a fan of dongles and other types of copy protection. He also complained at how long it took Windows to boot up, for him to check his calendar, and how long and unreliable it is at shutting down. XP isn't perfect, but using Hibernate (with the hotfix, as I have 2GB of RAM), it can be pretty quick. I'm very impressed with Vista, the mixed mode standby thing is great, and I can get my laptop go from a completely powered down state to staring at the webpage I had previously been viewing in IE7 in slightly under 30 seconds. I imagine the reason it even takes that long is because it's reading 2GB worth of data from the laptop hard disk (I can't wait to see what it's like when using the hybrid drives with Vista's ReadyDrive technology - Samsung and Seagate are meant to have 4GB prototypes, which I'd be quite interested in). As for Standby, that's impressive. Lift up the lid, the screen powers up and a split second later you're staring at the login screen (and presumably if you don't require a password when resuming from standby, you're at your desktop). Standby takes a while to power down, due to the "mixed" support that also saves the data to disk (like Hibernate) in case there's a power cut, but you can disable that if you're worried (or using a laptop with a decent battery?). I thnk the problem is too many people shut down their PCs, because that's what kept Windows 9x running pretty smoothly. But you don't have to shut down. In fact, I only seem to reboot when I install updates for Windows, and occasionally for new software. The rest of the time I use Hibernate, even on XP, as it's quicker to get back into Windows and even uses less power (as there is less CPU usage involved in getting it back up and running). So make better use of your time and energy bill, and start using Hibernate, and if you're using Vista you should use the default power management options instead of shutting it down every time.
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