Boot Windows in Under Ten Seconds
How long does your Windows PC take to boot? Two to three minutes is about average, under two minutes and you are doing really well, one minute or less and it’s either only a couple of days old or you’ve been doing some serious tweaking. So how about a Windows PC that boots in less than ten seconds? Well, Bios makers Phoenix Technologies reckon they can do just that. It’s called Instant Boot Bios and is based on a set of standards called UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) and some fancy pre-boot footwork in Windows 7, which apparently involves carrying out around 2 million instructions. Apparently with a bit more work it may be possible to boot a PC in a second or less, which sounds great but the question that has to be asked, is when it all goes wrong – as it inevitably will — how on earth will you be able to get to the BIOS menu?
Eee PC Does it…
As you may know I’m a huge fan of the Asus Eee PC 700 and dashed out and bought one, with my own money I hasten to add, the moment they went on sale, late last year. This titchy laptop has become my constant travelling companion, it does everything I need when I’m out and about and the price, at around £200, set a new benchmark for pocket notebooks and spawned a rash of clones and copies.
So now we have the Eee PC 1000, which follows hard on the heels of the first Eee PC upgrade (Eee PC 900) launched just a few weeks ago. The key feature of the 1000 is a 10-inch screen, (the 900’s screen is 8.9 inches) and like the 900 it has a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor. Read more
