Great boot up times in MBP

My new MBP boots up in a heart-beat. Is that due to the new Santa Rosa chip, or were the core duo's before like that?

 

in os x or windows?

compared to what?

os x is leaner than windows, thus faster boot times.

otherwise, it's the new hardware. what are you upgrading from? from all the benchmarks i've seen, the santa rosa platform is a pretty marginal performance upgrade over the previous c2d platform.

 

I guess compared to the boot up times before Santa Rosa.

 

actually

that is not true at all.

osx is NOT "leaner" than windows (xp) if you mean the amount of data that has to be loaded off of the hard drive at boot.

xp boots MUCH faster.

however, vista is a hog, i dont know about vista because i dont have it installed

 

is that right? i could never get my old xp laptop to boot in under 30 seconds, despite trying every performance tweek going...

my MBP (2.33Ghz) boots must faster straight out of the box with no tweaks... around 20 seconds. From what I have seen and heard on here, 20 secs is also the case with the ordinary macbooks.

?

 

Yeah, most of the modern Intel-based Macs boot up incredibly quickly.

To be honest, even my old Power Mac G4 Cube (with 768 megs of RAM and a 450 MHz PowerPC G4) boots up very quickly......... will go from being off to the desktop in under 30 seconds. In that machine's case though, it takes a while for it to load everything up, so you have to wait another 30 seconds to a minute to actually launch any apps, etc.

With the modern Intel-based Macs, everything is pretty much ready to go automatically.

 

I've got to be honest, I haven't really noticed any XP machines that boot "much faster" than a modern OS X based machine. Frankly I think they will both boot pretty fast (although XP seems to have the potential to get bogged down more waiting for stuff in the systray to load up).

 

by leaner i meant that os x straight up has less crap going on during start up, than xp straight up. i keep a close eye on what is trying to run at startup so my boot times in xp are nice and quick.

as far as data to be read from the hd, sure. i have no idea. maybe the startup tasks are just better managed in os x.

overall, it mostly depends on whether you let programs like msn run at startup , imo.

 

Sorry, but you are mistaken. On the newer Intel Macs with EFI the OS X boot times are very fast. Yes, faster than an equivalent PC with XP loaded. Vista is slower to boot than XP. Vista likes to cache 100's of MBs of data to RAM (if available) to speed up launching frequently used apps. In theory it's a good idea, but when dealing with portables with somewhat slow drives the caching becomes a resource hog.

Keep in mind that with modern OSs boot times are becoming less of a factor since reboots aren't as frequent as in the past (Vista excluded). As much crap as XP gets for being a sorry OS it actually has matured into a very stable OS. I can honestly say that because I own Macs and PCs. I was recently reminded how stable XP is when I upgraded to Vista. In the next edition of Webster's dictionary the word Vista should have a picture of a big steaming pile of poop.

 

im not comparing the boot time of osx on an intel mac compared to a "comparable pc with xp"

i guess i didnt make that clear.

i am comparing a 2.4ghz macbook pro booting up osx to that SAME macbook pro booting up xp. i will run the clock and tell you how much faster it is in a few minutes.

i dont care and im not anti-mac. i just bought a macbook pro and i use windows sparingly (gaming only)

it just comes down to the fact that there is more data to load with unix than xp. its not a bad thing. both boot very fast. unix is more stable. its worth it. plus- you dont have to turn your computer off if you dont want to with osx. with windows, you HAVE to just to recalibrate everything, or things stop working.

 

I would be curious about that......... generally speaking, both OS X and XP should be booting quickly with your setup. OS X shouldn't be taking that long to boot up and get to a useable state (i.e. able to launch apps, etc.).......... when I was testing it out at the Apple Store, it was around 10-15 seconds it seems from being off to booting to the desktop.

 

zadillo- is that just your estimate or did you use a watch?

either way- i was wrong.

osx took much less time to boot than xp on this machine.

osx was just a hair under 20 seconds. xp took 50.

but i WILL say that it figures that xp took so long to boot on a mac intel machine with an apple made program controlling the boot process. i swear boot camp artificially increased xp boot time to make osx look better by comparison.

i agree that osx is a better os- but i stand by the fact that xp should be booting faster than osx on the grounds that there is less required to boot (assuming both machines are clean)

you can also look at the footprint of both operating systems. xp takes like what- 5 gigs? osx takes more like 20. again- its not the biggest issue in the world to me that osx has 4x the footprint as xp. its worth it imo for a sharper os that doesn't have driver issues.

but my 3ghz pentium 4 (very slow by comparison) machine with half the ram (and about half the speed, too) - and, granted, 2x 7200 rpm hard drives in raid 0 - boots up xp in a matter of seconds, and i was hugely suprised at the length of time it took this mbp (and my mom's macbook, especially) to boot up osx.

and now with 50 second boot time for xp, which i guess i didnt notice before, things just seem more insane. i guess i was remembering my desktop boot time and mixing that memory into my brand new laptop. who knows.

 

Used my watch, yes.

As far as Boot Camp goes; remember that it is also emulating the BIOS boot up process (Macs use EFI). Perhaps that contributes to the time. Apple isn't sitting there building delays into the boot loader just to keep XP from loading up quickly. Once XP boots up, Boot Camp has nothing to do with it, frankly.

I'm not sure why you think those numbers are so off............ my XP-based P105 (with a C2D) took a similar amount of time to boot up.

I don't think that's just boot camp though........ I don't think you can compare your desktop to a typical laptop though. Many PC's I've seen don't boot XP in a matter of seconds (i.e. to the point where it's fully usable), and especially most laptops I've seen take longer than that......... my 2.4 GHz Athlon 64 3400+ with 1.5GB of RAM and a single 7200RPM hard drive takes about a minute to boot XP, for example (including waiting for it to load up everything and be able to actually launch an app).

By a matter of seconds I assume you mean that with your desktop, you get to the point of turning your desktop on to being in the XP desktop and able to launch an app in 4 or 5 seconds or something, and that is pretty impressive to me (personally, my BIOS process doesn't finish in that amount of time, much less Windows itself booting as well).

Anyway, sounds like the issue has been cleared up.

Are you really saying then that OS X doesn't boot up fast enough for you? You said you were hugely surprised at the length of time it takes your MBP to boot up OS X; personally I would be just as happy with a hair under 20 seconds.

 

Those times actually sound about right. I also have a 2.4 GHz MBP and I also have a Thinkpad T60. I would say that the T60 is optimized for XP. The MBP boots up XP quicker than the T60 (to be fair the T60 XP image is several months old). That is a good feat considering the MBP has a 5400 RPM drive vs. the T60's 7200 RPM drive.

 

Time your desktop with a stopwatch too. If you want to be scientific about it, time it a reasonable number of times and take the average, for both OSs and machines. Boot times are very susceptible to different perception. Besides, your desktop has a RAID setup, and while a 3GHz P-IV might lag behind a Core2Duo, there are *some* cases where raw CPU speed will bring you more performance. But to be sure and take away any risk, time your XP boot times in the desktop and then we'll see. Plus, there are times that OS X takes noticeably longer to boot, not sure why. Perhaps a disk check is performed every X boots like in a typical linux install. Maybe one of these times impressed you and you started thinking OS X is always slow.
As for the footprint of the OS, I can't agree. Download a nifty app called WhatSize that measures files and directories. You'll see that out of that 20GB you assign to OS X, almost 10GB are audio and video samples for iLife suite, and about 2GB are printer drivers. iWork takes another 2GB. So, a "lean" install of OS X can take about 4GB, including documentation, multi-language support, and so on. I'd post my results but I've heavilly tinkered both with OS X and XPSP2 setups, so my sizes are not meaningful. Even then, the size the OS takes on disk may not be directly related to what exactly is loaded during boot.

 

i know the boot process has to be emulated- i know that is why it took so long.

i also know that once you see the xp loading screen, boot camp isnt doing anything (except in the sense that you installed those apple drivers and software, which has to load)

but back to that boot process, there are a lot of ways to emulate things. emulation is basically never finished. you can always make it faster. the more time you put into it, the faster you will get it. its just how emulation works. and i really dont think apple has much incentive to work as hard as they can to get that bios emulation working really really fast. thats all im saying. even if they noticed a simple way to increase the bios emulation performance, i would wonder whether or not they would do it.

by the same token that the two finger scrolling barely works in xp, the "turn off trackpad when mouse is plugged in" feature doesn't exist in xp, and the "ignore accidental trackpad input" feature is also non-existant in xp, i just dont think they would any more than the minimal effort required to emulate a bios. why would they want to make xp boot faster?

i know its not fair to compare this against my desktop, despite it being 4 years older than this machine. literally the bios took 5 seconds, and then xp booting took another 4 or 5 more seconds. then i could launch apps. 10 seconds in. now the machine is bogged down 4 or 5 months later, but a reformat could fix that.

my mom's macbook seemed to take forever to launch osx when i saw it. maybe im crazy or maybe it was related to a software update, or maybe i'm just used to 10 second boots. but the reason that i think it is so far "off" was because 55 seconds on a brand new machine doesn't make sense against 10 seconds on a 4 year old machine. i know that its a laptop. but, whatever. in my head something is/was amiss.

yeah actually when i timed it i was surprised it seemed plenty fast. 20 seconds is nothing to worry about. 55 seconds is a while though.

i will ponder this more.

 

Check out this guys boot time, 20 seconds and his wifi is already connected, apps are all ready to go

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AId6Me1SBNc

 

oh wooky thats interesting. im a brand new mac switcher. there is a lot i don't know. but you have to admit that out of the box, whatever way you look at it, osx is a huge installation.

windows has its fair amount of software- targeted at achieving the same goals. it has a movie maker, a media player, chat software, etc. usability aside, im just saying that osx takes up more space than xp on a clean install. itunes, imovie, and ichat all count because its included in the install. windows media player and movie maker and MS messages all count too. you can remove them if you want, but there they are.

just like i said hair under 20.

 

I think they would. Apple didn't put the work into Boot Camp (and they don't go out of their way to keep it updated, as they did with the Boot Camp 1.3 release only days after the new MBP's came out) just to make it a crappy experience.

Generally speaking, Apple doesn't normally work this way. When they do implement a piece of software, they do what they can to make it work as well as possible.

If Apple didn't care about it, they would have just left the issue up completely to third parties.

As far as things not working in XP, I think that as soon as Boot Camp becomes finalized, those issues should be worked out.

Certainly Windows support isn't going to be a primary concern for Apple, but they will still work on making it work as well as they can.

Heck, one of the features they apparently were working on with Leopard was fast OS switching (something which apparently involved putting OS X and Windows respectively into frozen states to make the process of switching back and forth quicker). It does seem to have been pulled (at least public references to it have been pulled), and supposedly that's because of potential problems with filesystem corruption, etc...... whether it is going to come back in the final version of Leopard is unknown.

But the fact Apple was working on it makes it pretty clear they do care about making as good an experience as possible for those who will be using Windows as well.

Regarding your Mom's MacBook; if it just happened once or twice, it probably was just OS X performing a routing disk check (which includes optimization). If it is always taking a long time, I think it might indicate something wrong with it that probably should be looked into.

 

Actually, as some of the commenters there noted, that looks like more like 28 seconds. He pushes the power button at 58 seconds, it actually turns on at about 1:00 in and it becomes usable at 1:28 seconds.

That is longer than I've normally seen though..... it seems like it is stuck on the grey apple screen for longer than is typical.

The video does demonstrate how quickly it goes from the OS X loading part (the actual progress bar) to a usable desktop though.

 

hmm... well.

mine took 20 seconds on the clock. apparently that was 30 seconds (by the way i was counting, from hitting the power button to full usability). now that i see a 10 second difference between two runs- i have some reason to believe that i wasnt crazy. im pretty sure the boots i saw were more like a minute. probably a disk check or whatever you were saying. i dont know how osx works or what it does on boots just quite yet.

and as far as doing the scientific experiment with my desktop- its basically not going to happen. they have a lot of different parts (cpu, ram amount, ram speed are all faster on the mbp, while the hard drive is slower), and the windows installation is months old now. 10 seconds was accurate- but only on a clean system without any extra bloat having to launch on boot. im not about to reformat the machine just to time boots and then have to reinstall all my software.

 

My 4 year old PC boots much quicker than my C2D MBP. I have no idea why that is, but it usually hangs for a while at the gray screen. Once it hits the Mac OS X splash screen it is quick.

 

exactly. i think that is where my misconception arose. despite the increase in performance of all these parts- cpu, gpu, ram - hard drives havent seen much fundamental change. they are still the same old hard drives. thats why there is this new found demand for flash storage. the mobile hard drives increase in capacity- but not so much in speed. same as the desktop hard drives. such is the curse of mechanical parts. same thing occurs with all optical media.

 

i run raid 0 for my os drive. definitely made a difference when i put in over previous boot times. same with loading levels in games.

and definitely, the size of the install has very nearly zero to do with how much data gets loaded up during boot. the number of processes started at boot is going to be one of the biggest factors. no computer in the world is gonna boot quick if it's trying to handle 70+ process at startup (an acer laptop i saw out of the box).