Windows 8

[Fish]

Originally Posted by htismaqe

Hmm...kind of what I expected. I wonder if the increase in speed you guys are seeing is just the evolution of the OS, aka it's newer so it's better optimized for higher-end hardware and more RAM.

Win8 uses a different boot method than Win7. It's a sort of hybrid boot that incorporates a lot of hibernation behavior instead of the traditional cold boot. The kernel isn't completely closed at shutdown like in previous Windows versions, it's actually in a hibernation state.

Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk. If you’re not familiar with hibernation, we’re effectively saving the system state and memory contents to a file on disk (hiberfil.sys) and then reading that back in on resume and restoring contents back to memory. Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested).

It’s faster because resuming the hibernated system session is comparatively less work than doing a full system initialization, but it’s also faster because we added a new multi-phase resume capability, which is able to use all of the cores in a multi-core system in parallel, to split the work of reading from the hiberfile and decompressing the contents. For those of you who prefer hibernating, this also results in faster resumes from hibernate as well.

More: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2...windows-8.aspx

Win8 also uses EUFI instead of BIOS on EUFI capable mobos. If you have a EUFI supported mobo, that alone will reduce boot time by quite a bit.

EUFI: http://gcn.com/articles/2012/10/31/s...ello-uefi.aspx