What is your boot time?

[Darwin]

Thanks, Darwin.


Boot-time is now 2 minutes,  (more and more programs! How does this happen?). Not fast.

-Curt (December 01, 2008, 05:38 AM)

I have 335 programs installed under XP (as reported by Your Uninstaller! 2008 with screensavers and windows updates excluded from the list) and my boot time is about 2 minutes. What I've done is leave the XP machine as my "play with software" environment and (try to) keep the Vista notebook as a work machine with about 140 programs installed. It boots in under a minute, though I've not actually timed it. I'm pretty careful about loading anything under Vista - I don't want to slow it down! So I test any applications under XP first. Doesn't help too much if there are different installers for Vista and XP, but it's served me well so far... Of course, I have the luxury of doing this because all of my computers are notebooks, so I can run two or more of them simulataneoulsy (I use Synergy to use a common keyboard and mouse - kind of cool to zip between OS X, XP, Win2K and Vista  ).

[Curt]

- sounds cool, too, Darwin :-)  even more when I understood you also are driving Mac with the same keyboard & mouse! It has been 15 years since the last time I tried to even touch anything from Apple! ;-)  I cannot remember hotkeys so I don't bother to try again - I demand my context menu!     Other than that, I was impressed with the speed, 15 yrs ago; how is OS X comparing to Vista, regarding boot time and loading-of-apps time?

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I also had a dream about keeping this new Vista free of all the indifferent programs I have introduced to both Win2k and XP. Both were heavily under-powered, 320 MB RAM for Win2k, and 448 MB RAM for XP's 700+ programs, so it was easy to think "next time, less programs", but Vista seems to have so much more power coming from this "super-fetch" and the 4GB RAM, so someday I may have a lot of programs installed on this one as well!

[f0dder]

Curt: you didn't actually run 700+ programs at the same time, do you? Only the running apps sucks up ram

[Curt]

oops! Sometimes it really is hard not to be misunderstood 

As I recall it, I usually never had more than 80 processes running at the same time.

[nontroppo]

Other than that, I was impressed with the speed, 15 yrs ago; how is OS X comparing to Vista, regarding boot time and loading-of-apps time?

-Curt

On my hackintosh Dell workstation (2GB)[1], OS X Leopard (with more programs installed) used to load approximately 2.5X faster than Vista (after grub had done its thing). It shut down approx 2x faster too. On my macbook, OS X is again >2x faster than XP at startup. Also, one of the brilliant things about OS X is it doesn't seem to get slower the more software you add. I remember spending so much time keeping XP optimised (as many here do too), and my macbook XP is really spartan (it just really runs Matlab as its core duty, I guard against installing too much stuff otherwise), but my Leopard install is filled with trying just about every piece of software under the sun; yet Leopard never slows down over time (except when using iStat Menu which slows startup down enough I don't run it on my laptop).


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[1]Interestingly, the hackintosh loaded Leopard faster (~40secs) than my current monster Mac Pro (~50secs)...

[Darwin]

I dunno... my XP install has 335 applications installed under it and after booting has 81 processes running - boots reliably in about 1 minute 50 seconds. Obviously much slower than Leopard, but we're talking about an anaemic first generation Centrino notebook (1.4Ghz with 2GB of 266Mhz RAM and 5400rpm harddrive). At any rate, the "I dunno" comes in because I'm quite content with my boot times on that machine. FWIW, OS X 10.4.11 (aka Tiger) loads very slowly on my iBook, but then that machine is 7 years old, has a G3 500Mhz processor and 576MB RAM. I'm actually impressed that it loads at all Loading Tiger on that machine was a mistake as all it has really done is make me yearn for an Intel based Mac that I can run Leopard on!

To repeat my earlier comment: I'm only concerned about boot times if they are ludicrous, like 5 minutes or so, because to me that indicates something wrong. 2 minutes or less is perfectly fine because I use standby most of the time...

EDIT:  Just timed Tiger on the iBook... 59 seconds to a fully functional desktop! I had never timed it before - not sure how I concluded that it was slow 

[Darwin]

Wn2k Sp-4 on my 8 year old PIIIE 600Mhz notebook with 512MB RAM loads in 2 minutes 42 seconds (I timed loading to the desktop until the cursor reverts to the arrow, as opposed to the hourglass). Once loaded, there are 51 processes running. I have 176 applications installed. NB you can shave, perhaps, 10 to 15 seconds off that time because I blew entering my password not once, but three times - forgot that I had changed it yesterday  I should do it again to see what difference it made, but this is close enough. Note, too, that all of my windows machines require ctrl-alt-del logins at boot but I have the Mac set to log directly into my user account without a password required - haven't gotten around to setting that up. Even so, the 59 seconds is impressive!

Now, the issue of functionality is a whole different one... the Win2k machine (which has the same 8MB Video card as the iBook) RIPS through Office 2003. The iBook is much slower running Office 2008 (which isn't a fair comparison, I know), but then, even users running brand new Macs with loads of RAM, dual-core Intel processors complain about Office 2008 being a pig to load.

@nontroppo - what method/recipe did you follow to get your Hackintosh up and running? I'd be curious to try Tiger on one or more of my machines.

[nontroppo]

Darwin: I used a custom EFI bootloader and a lot of manual hacking to make a custom Leopard DVD myself, then finding kernel extensions for my hardware; but to be honest I'd recommend just getting Leo4All/iATKOS/Kalyway/JaS pre-built disks (there are both Tiger and Leopard options, I think JaS is the preferred Tiger one). Recently there is a cool OSXTOOL/Boot-132 option that allows you to much more easily go from the retail Leopard (Tiger too?) disk to a hackintosh install directly, but I haven't any experience of that.

As always, the InsanelyMac forums have all the info.

It was good fun from but took time to get all my hardware working (had to go one week without accelerated graphics[1] to find a solution to the ATI card I had, no audio till I got a $5 USB sound card etc). But once it was running, boy did it smoke Vista and XP on the same machine!

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[1] As I've said before though, graphics are so fast in OS X that with no graphics card drivers Leopard was faster in window drawing than XP with the latest drivers! I never understood it because GDI+ should be hardware accelerated AFAIK. 

[Darwin]

Interesting, nontroppo, thanks! I have a full Tiger DVD (though I had to *cough, cough* "work around" the DVD challenged nature of my iBook) so thought I'd install that. I'll take a look at the Insanely Mac forums  

[Darwin]

[OT]@nontroppo - are you running any sort of security applicatoin on OS X? Just curious if you have a recommendation. I'm appalled by the price of the commercial offerings (average is somewhere north of $70 US) but am looking at ClamXav...[/OT]

[nontroppo]

Think I'll start a new thread as that is off-topic enough to derail a bullet train 

[Curt]

I usually light up a cig and hit the start button,
(...) 
I launch my XP several times a day, so I do smoke a lot...

-Curt (February 02, 2008, 08:40 AM)

today the 4'th of February 2014 it is my 1 year anniversary for not smoking!

I just had to tell 

Also the boot time is better 

[tomos]

^ Hah! well done all round Curt

[40hz]

I usually light up a cig and hit the start button,
(...)  
I launch my XP several times a day, so I do smoke a lot...

-Curt (February 02, 2008, 08:40 AM)

today the 4'th of February 2014 it is my 1 year anniversary for not smoking!

I just had to tell  

-Curt (February 04, 2014, 03:35 AM)

Congrats Curt! I was a two pack a day guy. I gave it up New Year's Eve December 31, 1996. I'm now 17+ years smoke-free and I've never regretted it. Truth is, I'm probably still alive today because I did.