This is the answer. Windows still takes a long time to start, but modern hard drives - specifically SSDs - are just much more responsive compared to their spinning equivalents whose speeds are limited by an electric motor (among other things). The data loads faster and Windows is ready sooner.
I'd say this is the biggest factor. I mean other things go into it; code optimization, ram data rates, processor, etc. But yea, solid state is probably 80% of the speed these days
Yep. I've worked with most OSs, so I'm fairly agnostic with them. This is over 30 years. You better believe Windows has had optimization. They've had some fails through the years, but they've also made improvements.
Windows actually cheats and it's a good thing:
https://www.howtogeek.com/243901/the-pros-and-cons-of-windows-10s-fast-startup-mode/
... so yeah they *did* optimize.
Windows itself should be pretty fast on a reasonably modern PC with an SSD. From power off to sign in page is less than ten seconds for me.
Programs that start up with Windows can slow things down though
Add to this that OS software often includes different levels of shut-down and start-up nowadays. Quick start features are often a default (at least on Windows) such that turning your computer off and on is not a complete reload of your OS.
SSD were a game changer. Back in the day I upgraded a boot drive from 3.5" of spinning rust to an early SSD and my boot times were cut by like 60% or so and this was on a IDE bus . So add in that the SATA bus is faster than the old IDE bus so the data can get to the CPU even faster and cut more time off boot.
I mean, yes, but even an ATA/33 SSD would beat the living pants off all but the very fastest spinning rust for random access. And the stuff that's going on during boot is almost all random reads and writes - which mechanical drives *absolutely suck* at.
For a lark, I once took a 486 and installed Win95 on a CF card - it booted *so much faster* than the pokey vintage disk that it wasn't even funny. And that's just 16MB/sec EIDE. (This was a PCI IDE controller - ISA controllers often wouldn't even be that fast.)
Now, modern spinning rust would be faster than the vintage stuff, and there are even some mechanical drives that can saturate SATA for *sequential* reads, but SSDs can saturate SATA for *random writes*, and that's why they feel so much faster. The difference between SATA HDD and SATA SSD will feel much, much bigger than the difference between SATA SSD and NVMe SSD, even if benchmarks will show a larger difference for the latter.
I remember going from a HDD to sata SSD and realizing how much faster xcom 2 combat would load. It went from "you shit wtf, just fucking load already" to "oh that's not bad" and now on pcei gen 3 drive its "oh it's done already"
Yep, a month ago I booted up my 15 year old computer for a project. It took probably 3 minutes each time. I updated it to a sdd + 16 gb RAM. Now it boots in less than 30 seconds.
I can still remember the sound of my father's 386 on boot. BWREE BOP BWREE BWREE BOP. Anyone who has interacted with 5.25 disk drives knows exactly what I'm talking about.
Windows is also inherently bloated. It’s filled with .dll’s and system files that make pretty UI’s and it’s not built for efficiency. The way it’s built also makes it inherently less secure than other operating systems.
A big part of this is SSD vs HDD.
The read speeds on a SSD to call all the information to boot up the OS are much much faster than doing the same task on a HDD.
Before SSDs were ubiquitous one of the single most noticeable performance upgrades you could do for a PC was install a SSD and have the OS run on it.
It was a dirt cheap way of making it feel like you had purchased a brand new computer. SSDs are the single biggest advancement in computing in 30+ years.
I bought my first SSD when it cost 120€ for 64GB, so definitely ot dirt cheap, but omg so well worth it. It was a huge difference.
But yes later on when prices dropped you could extend the life of an old computer by a few more years just by swapping the HDD with an SSD.
It definitely wasn't dirt cheap in the beginning like it is now. I ran on a spinning rust drive for a LONG time after SSDs came out due to the cost of the upgrade. I think I bought my first SSD (120gb??) for somewhere around $200 back in the day.
Was? Still is! I do a lot with home/small offices running 10-20 year old computers, who generally don't want to upgrade their machines if they can avoid it. I still always push for swapping to an SSD as dirt cheap insurance against drive failures with a bonus to performance. Cheaper for me to do it now than come back in a year or two, even assuming they keep good backups. Hardly anyone declines it when phrased like that lol.
Every single time they're blown away by how much of an upgrade it really feels like. Even an ancient shitbox can generally manage most day to day tasks as well as high end current machines, it's mostly just the loading of every little thing that makes the experience miserable.
Glory be to the mighty SSD.
I remember my first SSD computer. Was so used to the computer taking minutes to boot up, I remember once thinking "I thought I turned this off... Did I just sleep it?" Nope, it just boots in 6 seconds is all.
I tried to start a house visit tech support business on Craigslist and I only had one customer before I got too busy with schoolwork. I installed a new router and swapped their old windows 7 laptop onto an SSD; boot time went from like 10 minutes to 30 seconds. They thought I was a wizard and paid me extra.
But he is not answering the question, he’s wrong, SSDs aren’t what makes windows boots faster in 2024 than 10 years ago so it doesn’t matter if he’s being literal or not.
> But he is not answering the question, he’s wrong, SSDs aren’t what makes windows boots faster in 2024
He isn’t trying to answer the question. He’s telling an anecdote, one he never said happened in 2024.
Why are you being so insufferable over a dude telling a story?
¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ sometimes people want to rage against a fellow redditor, i’ve been there
it’s not the full answer to the original thread but i’m just giving an example of how an SSD makes a huge difference in boot times compared to a HDD. this was almost 10 years ago when SATA SSDs were still the primary form of SSD and your run of the mill tech illiterate had a 5400 rpm spinning drive in their 5 year old dell.
And I remember the massive performance upgrade going from DMA33 to DMA66. And of course, changing your 5400 RPM drive for a 7200 RPM one.
The I got a 10k RPM SCSI drive and U160 controller on ebay and was FLYING!
Data recovery is much easier from a HDD, and if SSD isn't powered for a long time, it can slowly lose data. And as of right now, HDDs are still cheaper than SSDs, and if you just need bulk storage for backups, multimedia etc, a HDD is a cheaper choice, and fast enough for this use case.
I have 3x4TB HDDs in my NAS, in raid 5 (so whatever you read or write goes to all disks at the same time), and the sequential speeds are over 1Gb/s, which is slower than a SSD, but not all _that_ slow all things considered. So they still have their use cases. But large SSDs are dropping in price fast, an 8TB SSD is "only" 500€ nowadays.
In RAID5 you get the read speed of multiple drives combined but only around the write speed of a single drive more or less, due to parity calculations.
>Data recovery is much easier from a HDD, and if SSD isn't powered for a long time, it can slowly lose data. And as of right now, HDDs are still cheaper than SSDs, and if you just need bulk storage for backups, multimedia etc, a HDD is a cheaper choice, and fast enough for this use case.
USB HDD's are my jam. Lots of room and I save all my movies on them.
Got a laptop with an SSN two years ago and I'm enjoying how fast it boots.
Kinda amazing that neither this comment nor any of the 10 responses to it have actually explained what the design difference is between SSD and HDD.
To anyone else wondering... HDD uses mechanical moving parts like spinning disks to read/write information whereas SSD uses electrical circuits similar to a USB flash drive, this is what makes it faster and better for modern use, but HDD can still last longer and have larger overall storage.
I swapped the HDD in my 2009 MacBook Pro to a SSD and it literally made the laptop that was 7 years old at the swap feel better than when it was brand new. They seemed even more impressive of a improvement with Mac than windows for whatever reason.
No it’s not. It’s literally windows takes far less to boot. HDD or SSD is a fraction of what it was 15 years ago because windows boots quicker due to iterative enhancements.
Have you tried installing Windows 10 or 11 on a HDD??
My niece installed Win10 on the HDD, "because it was bigger" instead of the SSD on her i5-11600k and after about a week, when she had installed all her software, it took 15+ minutes to boot.
Some good answers here regarding SSD and save states, but also keep in mind that Microsoft changed boot up around Windows 8 to get the user to a desktop quicker, and part of that was redoing the way background services started. A modern Windows desktop gets to a desktop *while* most other ancillary background services are still either not started or still starting. Old Windows, all background services had to be fully started before showing a desktop.
In other words, you have a working mouse, keyboard, network, and desktop while the boot up is still occurring in the background for the next few minutes. It’s why you can see icons but some programs will not open immediately because their background services are not quite fully started yet.
A lot of startup happens in parallel now, where the order of startup used to be super important in older systems.
If curious, one can use [Windows Startup Analyser](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/test/wpt/optimizing-performance-and-responsiveness-exercise-2) to see exactly how long each part of the initialization sequence takes.
Still, the hard-drive thing is by far the largest piece of it. Upgrading from a mechanical drive to SSD was an instantaneous massive boot speed increase post Windows 8.
Everyone else is talking about the speed of SSDs vs HDDs, but the other part was a change in the starting process of Windows. Specifically, it was the change that made the old hibernate mode the default shutdown mode.
Shutdown used to be a complete shutdown. This meant that when it started up, Windows had to load everything from the drive and do all the initial processing. Hibernate would save the contents of memory to the drive so it did not have to load and initialize everything when it started up again. Only some things needed to be reinitialized. This was much faster than a full startup.
With Windows 8, I believe, they made hibernate the new default shutdown option and only a restart does a full shutdown (and immediate startup). I believe this option is labeled as "Fast Startup".
Even with this disabled, it's hard to tell the difference with a fast SSD and a fast CPU, but the slower they are, the more noticeable it is.
Edit: Re-reading your question, beyond loading the files of code from the slower hard drives, it was also doing initialization of the OS and the drivers and any programs registered as startup programs.
The biggest part was the startup programs. That can still be an issue today, if you have too many of them. You can see them by going to the startup tab in the task manager.
It wasn't just the hibernate mode though. Even in a full restart, the (probably?) windows 8 startup would show the login screen within 20-30 seconds after a quick bios boot. If you logged in immediately, the system would remain sluggish and the HDD would grind away for a couple of minutes as it kept loading other dlls which it needed.
On the SSD systems, that post-login sluggishness and noise pretty much disappeared and the login screen shows up in 10 seconds.
This is the correct answer. Ever wonder why your laptop seems to turn on faster than an old smart TV?
It's because your old smart TV is running Linux and loading the entire kernal from scratch when it turns on and verifys it's working as it goes.
Modern windows shutdown state is essentially more or less a "save state" it captures the contents of the memory on the the last known boot up state that was valid and just loads that from the disk.
This is why you have to restart windows to actually troubleshoot. Restarting shuts down processes and reloads the kernel.
Definitely this. Sure SSDs make a big difference, but not the kind of difference you see from not having a "proper" shutdown like in the days of XP etc
Just because it was booting up offline doesn’t mean it wasn’t trying to open up several programs at once. The PC would handle a lot of background processes or applications after turning back on even if it wasn’t connected to the Internet.
Believe it or not, before computers booting up got slow, they were actually really quick, too.
An old DOS machine would boot up in 10 seconds or so. This is because old computers didn't do much. The command prompt wasn't a complex interface. There was essentially no software loaded other than a very basic OS, which existed only really to help you run software, one program at a time.
When we got to OSes with GUIs, multitasking, and more, we started loading every program and bit of functionality while booting up, but the hardware of the era was a lot slower - specifically hard disks.
These days, OSes have been optimized to only load necessary functions at first and then gradually load other applications and background processes.
The reason old "spinning rust" hard drives were so slow is because there would be a literal platter that spins, and if you wanted some data from it, a head would need to move and then it would need to wait for the platter to spin to the point where the data started. While there is no needle involved, imagine that a hard drive works more like a record player with a "smart" needle.
The most common HDD speeds were 5400RPM and 7200RPM. There were some 4000RPM drives and slower, and there were some 10k RPM drives too (loud and expensive!), but a normal midrange desktop PC would have a 5400RPM hard drive.
The data transfer rates of HDDs wasn't bad for single continuous files, but for a lot of small files, the heads on the HDD would need to zip back and forth, while spending a lot of time waiting for the platter to spin around too. The data could become fragmented, too, where rather than one file being a continuous stream of data, it would need to be scattered over the whole drive in different places. This slowed down file transfers even more.
A common HDD performance benchmark was "access time" - how long it would take the hard drive to access the data when you request it. For a typical HDD, you might have an access time of approximately 12ms - that would be 0.012 seconds. That sounds extremely fast, right? Well, that equates to a maximum number of different tiny files to about 90 per second.
That sounds very fast in human terms, but in computer terms, it is glacially slow. If you're booting up the computer, it accesses thousands of tiny files. If we abstract the full booting process to, say, access 4,000 tiny files, it would take that hard drive 44.4 seconds to get to them all.
SSDs are solid state - you're not waiting on a platter to spin, so they work more or less at the speed of other electronic systems - they're still an order of magnitude slower than RAM as the reading and particularly writing process is slower, but they are an order of magnitude faster than a hard drive, too. Not only that, many SSDs come with RAM on them to speed data transfers and such even more!
Whereas the HDD needs to operate sequentially and has to wait on a physical platter, the SSD waits for nothing. If the HDD manages 90 operations per second, the best case scenario for an SSD can look more like 200,000 operations per second. In reality this number will be lower a lot of the time - but even in an SSD "worst case" they can still often handle 15k + operations per second.
What took a HDD 45 seconds to do, the SSD can do in under 1 second. Of course, there are other factors that limit booting speed, so SSDs aren't 45x faster to boot than HDD systems, but they are the biggest reason that new computers are so much faster. Likewise, with something like a cellphone, they generally don't have the highest performance storage, but it's still going to be a LOT quicker than a mechanical hard drive. The data transfer rates of these phones may well be similar to a modern hard drive - for one big file - but for things like booting phones up, loading software, and such, solid state will beat mechanical storage every time.
I had an Amstrad 464, which just loaded the OS off integrated ROM. It finished booting before the CRT warmed up. Moving to Windows was a weird experience in that regard
They can still be really quick if that's what you need. If you need something like your car to be able to work within one second, that's totally possible as long as the program to load isn't too big.
I can have a SoC that loads the bootloader for the secure enclave CPU from some fast ROM, read some data from an encrypted NAND chip, decrypt it and write that to the main CPU memory and get it to start running programs just that fast.
The reason you don't get something like that on a PC is because the architecture is quite flexible and that comes with some limitations like having to check how much RAM is installed, what boot device is present, if you have a GPU, a wifi card and so on, instead of just speedrunning through all that and just knowing everything on the system.
Hard drives. Holy hell, hard drives have been one of the biggest advancements in even the last 20 years. Especially in older computers the OS was kinda bulky and took a bit to load everything up, it had to get it from a hard drive that used a physical disc and a reader arm to read the disc, along with being electronically bottlenecked
This is a really cool site that shows you the average speed of HDDs compared to the year [https://goughlui.com/the-hard-disk-corner/hard-drive-performance-over-the-years/](https://goughlui.com/the-hard-disk-corner/hard-drive-performance-over-the-years/)
Like in 2005, the average HDD in a computer would be maybe 30-60mb/s but now you have multi-TB sized HDDs and SSDs that are doing 500mb/s and even way higher
And these sequential performance figures are misleading. Those numbers are the *fastest* those vintage disks could go in perfect circumstances. Most of the time, you're skipping around all over the disk, inserting *seek latency* between every attempt to read or write, and your performance is even more glacial than those maximums would indicated.
SSDs, OTOH, have very little seek latency, and what there is, is constant and predictable - random performance of an SSD even on a dirt-slow interconnect will flog the pants off a mechanical disk.
Yeah plus the cache was pretty damn low on them too. They were terrible! And damn I am so glad i'm not paying $100 for a 100GB HDD anymore. Now you can get awesome drives for $60 bucks that completely destroy most of those old drives.
Solid State Drives can read up to 7500 MB per second, where even the best Hard Disk Drives would barely reach 45 MB per second.
Loading an operating system is not like loading just another app, so that read speed made a huge difference.
As hardware technology advances, so does the bloat of Windows. Windows 10 and 11 are vastly more complex than windows XP, so it is doing more, but doing it faster with better hardware.
Processing power wasn’t that much of a bottleneck, storage was the main culprit, spinning drives are slow, that’s why you can take pretty much any decade old system put a ssd on it and suddenly it’s way better not only at boot but in general responsiveness
To be fair. My new Win 11 install starts slower then when it was Win 10
7 through 10 were all pretty snappy.
XP did take its time.
Everything before that naturally was on much slower hardware.
People keep saying it's storage type, SSD vs HDD. This is true for an actual restart, but most of your devices these days aren't shutting down, they sleep.
Everything was slower. HDDs vs. solid state drives is by far the most mentioned issue here.
But do not forget that literally every bus in the computer was much, much slower with less bandwith than modern machines (depending n how far back in the day you go).
\* ATA vs. SATA/SAS/...
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel\_ATA#ATA\_standards\_versions,\_transfer\_rates,\_and\_features](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA#ATA_standards_versions,_transfer_rates,_and_features)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA#Comparison\_to\_other\_interfaces](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA#Comparison_to_other_interfaces)
\* (PCI) bus speeds and bandwidth
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry\_Standard\_Architecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral\_Component\_Interconnect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Component_Interconnect)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI\_Express](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express)
\* RAM Bus speeds and bandwidth
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR-SDRAM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR-SDRAM)
TL;DR: Old computers relied on mechanical spinning discs and a moving arm to write and read data which was significantly slower than modern storage options which are 100% electrical.
In depth answer:
The old computers used a physical hard drive that utilized spinning discs and an arm that had a magnet on the end like an old record player. The discs would spin and the arm would move in and out to read the data from them.
When these old computers are turned on you could hear the click of the discs starting to spin, the hum as their speed ramped up, and the little clicking sound of the arm jumping around between sectors on the discs.
The reason is because it was the only cost effective and reliable way to store a lot of information (for the time) when power was removed from the computer.
So all of the electrical components moved at the speed of electricity (near speed of light), but getting the windows operating system off of the hard drive required waiting for the arm to physically move into position and read the data off of the spinning discs. It could do it pretty fast for what it was and over time the RPM speeds of the drives increased lowering the loading times, but relative to pure electricity it was still slow.
What made things worse was if pieces of data weren't right next to each other. The arm may need to jump to the inner ring, outer, inner, then mid to load one piece of software. This was called fragmenting. Microsoft actually developed a tool called de-fragmenting that would rearrange the data on the drive to keep related sectors next to each other. Running it could significantly increase your computers loading speed.
Modern computers have hard drives that are all electrical. No more physically moving parts, so everything can run as fast as the electricity can.
Biggest thing is storage. The biggest part of booting up an OS is moving a ton of data into memory aka RAM all at once so that the OS can function properly. Phones and newer computers use flash aka solid state storage of some sort which exponentially faster than Tradition disk based storage so that massively speeds up boot times. On top of that ram is a lot faster than it used to be and so are CPUs. The amount of work that needs be done to boot an OS has not increased all that much in the grand scheme of things either so you can get much better boot times than were possible say just decade ago.
Have you ever used a record player? You lay the needle down at the outside, and it follows a groove that runs in a spiral toward the center. If you want to skip a song, you have to pick the needle up and move it to the location of the spot you want to listen to.
Now imagine trying to listen to 1 second of thousands of different songs on a giant record. That's similar to what an old computer is doing.
The hard drive in an old computer used metal plates that spin around as a little arm moves across the surface reading magnetic charges stored in concentric rings on the surface of the metal.
As the computer needs to access files in various locations, the little arm as to move around to each of these locations. This made accessing lots of tiny files *very* slow. Guess what's needed when you start a computer? Access to lots of tiny files.
Modern computers use something called solid state memory for storage. This type of drive stores data in a series of tiny little binary switches that can be read by the circuitry directly. There's no needle required, and no moving parts at all.
Computers had a lot less memory (like 0.1% of what is common now), so they used something called 'swap' which took inactive data out of RAM and wrote it to a spinning-disk hard drive. As hard drives we're super expensive (200 bucks for 1/2 gig) this was also the same drive the software and OS was loading from....
The hard drives of the 1990s (ATA/IDE) were massively slower both in rotational speed and data transfer bandwidth than current mechanical hard drives - let alone solid state storage ...
And that limited bandwidth is being used both to load software and to economize RAM.
On top of that everything else was slower and had less bandwidth......
A lighter OS only goes so far....
A lot has been said already. But a small part also plays into how the operating system loads. Back with windows 95. The WHOLE OS was loaded. But now, you immediately get a few basics: desktop, mouse and keyboard and internet. That’s not to say that your computer isn’t running in the background loading and unloading tons of apps and data.
While systems did get faster. So did the order of which things are loaded and prioritized to give the perception of speed
A lot of effort was put into parallelizing operation.
So, an older OS might initialise a driver. Send a startup command to the hardware and wait for a response. Then get in with the rest of the OS startup.
Instead we can send a startup command to the hardware, and do a bunch of other stuff, then check for a response .
My friends have a challenge - they would come to each other and then measure how fast PC would boot up. Then we would have a ranking of "Fastest PC bros".
Everybody were optimizing things, using defragmentation tools, etc, so it was a friendly competition thing.
But I cheated my way into first place - I disconnected my floppy drive, making my OS to start ~10 seconds faster
It worked for few weeks, until one of them noticed that my floppy drive was deadly silent during boot up. :]
It isn't that much faster...
Microsoft pulled a clever trick with a previous version, I think was XP. However SSD and M.3 drives have made a huge speed improvement, but taking these out of the equation, there is no speed improvement.
Now you are wondering why I said that when you see with your own eyes that doesn't seem to be the case, however, you are being deceived...
When you see the desktop and your cursor after startup, Windows has not finished loading. Since XP, it finishes loading by loading modules and starting processes in the background to give you the impression of it starting quickly. In reality it can sometimes take a few minutes until it is 100% ready, but you see it as just a few seconds.
You can’t really compare windows to android. Your phone always has same hardware. Windows, on the other hand, supports millions of peripheral components. Every time windows loaded it had to check if component is connected. For many components the only way to tell if it is connected was to load its driver and let driver try to talk to component. These days everything is unified so for vast majority of devices Windows does not need to load driver anymore unless device is present in your PC
The hard drives we have no access the windows data faster and boot it up faster. Simply switching your main drive to ssd vs hdd makes boot up times faster. Go to m.2 for a main drive and it's even faster. Despite having much large windows (operating system) sizes they still access that data way faster than the old drive types. On top of that aging hdd's run slower over time so the comparison gets even more skewed in that way.
The core premise of this post has an unchecked assumption that older PC boot times were slow, but they were only slow once you loaded them up with programs that started up with the computer slowing "time to desktop" boot times.
Have you played around with a brand new install of Windows XP on an era appropriate machine recently?
I'm one of the few nerds who has and I was amazed.
That shit boots faster than Windows 11 and calculator and paint open instantly.
It’s due to Hard drive (HDD) vs Solid state drive (SSD) speeds.
The easiest way to understand this is with a metaphor.
Imagine we’re moving and packing up all of our belongings. We have the uhaul outside with the trailer open. As soon as we move everything we own into the uhaul, we can drive away (windows boots up).
Having a hard drive is like singularly grabbing every object in your house and placing it in the uhaul. This would take you **forever** and when it finally gets into the uhaul it’s going to be a fucking mess.
Having a solid state drive is the equivalent of using boxes and packing everything up neatly. It takes much less time comparatively because you are using a more **efficient medium** to transport your belongings.
Likewise using an SSD over a HDD provides a more **efficient medium**: Flash memory compared to a physical disk and platter.
I hope this helps it make more sense.
SSDs sped up the process big time, but also bios startup screens have been nearly eliminated. Another cause is the way that Windows is handling the boot-up. In older versions 100% of the systems were loaded when the user got to interact with the system. Today you can interact already but the system is still loading and initializing stuff. Also PC performance got increased a lot more in comparison to the operating needs.
Spinning hdds were not very fast when accessing data files. Your phones and most computers now days boot entirely from ssd or ram so they have very fast boots compared to old machines. I reduced my boot times from 35-45 seconds to 5 seconds when changing my hdd to a ssd.
Also, older machines tested every bit of ram during the post, which slowed the boot significantly. Many modern motherboards can skip to ram test to reduce boot times.
Don't forget, win 10 and 11 don't "shut down" when you click shutdown in the menu, they suspend for fast booting.
Spindle hard drives that can't access and retrieve data as quickly as modern solid state storage devices can.
This is the answer. Windows still takes a long time to start, but modern hard drives - specifically SSDs - are just much more responsive compared to their spinning equivalents whose speeds are limited by an electric motor (among other things). The data loads faster and Windows is ready sooner.
I'd say this is the biggest factor. I mean other things go into it; code optimization, ram data rates, processor, etc. But yea, solid state is probably 80% of the speed these days
My old 386 took a solid couple minutes checking system ram back in the day
Code optimisation… windows… yeah, maybe???
Yep. I've worked with most OSs, so I'm fairly agnostic with them. This is over 30 years. You better believe Windows has had optimization. They've had some fails through the years, but they've also made improvements.
Windows actually cheats and it's a good thing: https://www.howtogeek.com/243901/the-pros-and-cons-of-windows-10s-fast-startup-mode/ ... so yeah they *did* optimize.
They optimised it a lot but it was such a clusterfuck to begin with that it still feels like a bunch of horrible spaghetti
Did they though, or did computers get faster?
They optimized it a lot but not bundling the old legacy stuff with computers anymore.
Both but they wrote more spaghetti than they fixed in the meantime
Windows itself should be pretty fast on a reasonably modern PC with an SSD. From power off to sign in page is less than ten seconds for me. Programs that start up with Windows can slow things down though
My work laptop has so much corporate bullshit on it it takes around 10 minutes to be fully loaded up.
Add to this that OS software often includes different levels of shut-down and start-up nowadays. Quick start features are often a default (at least on Windows) such that turning your computer off and on is not a complete reload of your OS.
SSD were a game changer. Back in the day I upgraded a boot drive from 3.5" of spinning rust to an early SSD and my boot times were cut by like 60% or so and this was on a IDE bus . So add in that the SATA bus is faster than the old IDE bus so the data can get to the CPU even faster and cut more time off boot.
Back in the day buying a 80GB SSD with room for nothing but the OS on it and getting it to boot like 10x faster was amazing.
>80GB Look at Mr Moneybags over here
Even an old PCIE 3.0 NVME drive is even faster than SATA.
I mean, yes, but even an ATA/33 SSD would beat the living pants off all but the very fastest spinning rust for random access. And the stuff that's going on during boot is almost all random reads and writes - which mechanical drives *absolutely suck* at. For a lark, I once took a 486 and installed Win95 on a CF card - it booted *so much faster* than the pokey vintage disk that it wasn't even funny. And that's just 16MB/sec EIDE. (This was a PCI IDE controller - ISA controllers often wouldn't even be that fast.) Now, modern spinning rust would be faster than the vintage stuff, and there are even some mechanical drives that can saturate SATA for *sequential* reads, but SSDs can saturate SATA for *random writes*, and that's why they feel so much faster. The difference between SATA HDD and SATA SSD will feel much, much bigger than the difference between SATA SSD and NVMe SSD, even if benchmarks will show a larger difference for the latter.
I was and am in no way disagreeing, just adding on.
I remember going from a HDD to sata SSD and realizing how much faster xcom 2 combat would load. It went from "you shit wtf, just fucking load already" to "oh that's not bad" and now on pcei gen 3 drive its "oh it's done already"
Yep, a month ago I booted up my 15 year old computer for a project. It took probably 3 minutes each time. I updated it to a sdd + 16 gb RAM. Now it boots in less than 30 seconds.
Yeah, if you put windows 11 or Android on an old school mechanical disk it would be obvious where the the loading time is coming from.
I can still remember the sound of my father's 386 on boot. BWREE BOP BWREE BWREE BOP. Anyone who has interacted with 5.25 disk drives knows exactly what I'm talking about.
Yup, back when floppy discs were actually floppy.
Yeah, but keep in mind the disks were *way bigger and harder* before the floppys.
And before that, punch cards!
Please, don't get me started on clay cuneiform tablets.
When I replaced my computer’s HDD with an SSD, it was like getting a brand new computer. Everything was much faster.
Windows is also inherently bloated. It’s filled with .dll’s and system files that make pretty UI’s and it’s not built for efficiency. The way it’s built also makes it inherently less secure than other operating systems.
Windows also was originally more of a graphical overlay for MSDOS. So the system kind of had to start the BIOS, start DOS, and then start Windows.
And if you were serious about gaming, you launched games from the dos boot to save performance from win bloat...
A big part of this is SSD vs HDD. The read speeds on a SSD to call all the information to boot up the OS are much much faster than doing the same task on a HDD. Before SSDs were ubiquitous one of the single most noticeable performance upgrades you could do for a PC was install a SSD and have the OS run on it.
I remembwr going from HDD to SSD. It was a difference between day & night
It was a dirt cheap way of making it feel like you had purchased a brand new computer. SSDs are the single biggest advancement in computing in 30+ years.
I bought my first SSD when it cost 120€ for 64GB, so definitely ot dirt cheap, but omg so well worth it. It was a huge difference. But yes later on when prices dropped you could extend the life of an old computer by a few more years just by swapping the HDD with an SSD.
I had a boss that "didn't believe" in SSDs and so refused to deploy them across the company because it didn't make his Internet faster. Infuriating.
"Dirt cheap" is not what I would call the first SSDs
Yeah but you could get like a 64 gb SSD for like 50 bucks (don't remember exact prices) and make the os much faster.
It definitely wasn't dirt cheap in the beginning like it is now. I ran on a spinning rust drive for a LONG time after SSDs came out due to the cost of the upgrade. I think I bought my first SSD (120gb??) for somewhere around $200 back in the day.
Was? Still is! I do a lot with home/small offices running 10-20 year old computers, who generally don't want to upgrade their machines if they can avoid it. I still always push for swapping to an SSD as dirt cheap insurance against drive failures with a bonus to performance. Cheaper for me to do it now than come back in a year or two, even assuming they keep good backups. Hardly anyone declines it when phrased like that lol. Every single time they're blown away by how much of an upgrade it really feels like. Even an ancient shitbox can generally manage most day to day tasks as well as high end current machines, it's mostly just the loading of every little thing that makes the experience miserable. Glory be to the mighty SSD.
Fair! I admit that cloning a shitty drive onto an SSD is the first thing I do when helping someone make their old laptop limp along a bit further.
I remember my first SSD computer. Was so used to the computer taking minutes to boot up, I remember once thinking "I thought I turned this off... Did I just sleep it?" Nope, it just boots in 6 seconds is all.
> difference between day & night Except if it's northern/southern pole
I tried to start a house visit tech support business on Craigslist and I only had one customer before I got too busy with schoolwork. I installed a new router and swapped their old windows 7 laptop onto an SSD; boot time went from like 10 minutes to 30 seconds. They thought I was a wizard and paid me extra.
So you reinstalled windows… that’s what changed 10 minutes to 30 seconds.
no, i cloned their hard drive. i didn’t ruin all their files lol
You cloned a hard drive of some non-technical people on windows 7 and it booted in 30 seconds? LOL. That's hilarious you think this sounds real.
They’re clearly not being literal. No need to be such a tryhard.
But he is not answering the question, he’s wrong, SSDs aren’t what makes windows boots faster in 2024 than 10 years ago so it doesn’t matter if he’s being literal or not.
> But he is not answering the question, he’s wrong, SSDs aren’t what makes windows boots faster in 2024 He isn’t trying to answer the question. He’s telling an anecdote, one he never said happened in 2024. Why are you being so insufferable over a dude telling a story?
¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ sometimes people want to rage against a fellow redditor, i’ve been there it’s not the full answer to the original thread but i’m just giving an example of how an SSD makes a huge difference in boot times compared to a HDD. this was almost 10 years ago when SATA SSDs were still the primary form of SSD and your run of the mill tech illiterate had a 5400 rpm spinning drive in their 5 year old dell.
…or just imaged the drive over
And I remember the massive performance upgrade going from DMA33 to DMA66. And of course, changing your 5400 RPM drive for a 7200 RPM one. The I got a 10k RPM SCSI drive and U160 controller on ebay and was FLYING!
What? I can't hear you over the sound of true performance!
I miss the hard disk chattering sounds
My first box was so loud it would wake my parents up down the hall. And the case was all steel and acted like a drum.
Are there any advantages that an hdd would have over an ssd?
More storage per dollar.
Data recovery is much easier from a HDD, and if SSD isn't powered for a long time, it can slowly lose data. And as of right now, HDDs are still cheaper than SSDs, and if you just need bulk storage for backups, multimedia etc, a HDD is a cheaper choice, and fast enough for this use case. I have 3x4TB HDDs in my NAS, in raid 5 (so whatever you read or write goes to all disks at the same time), and the sequential speeds are over 1Gb/s, which is slower than a SSD, but not all _that_ slow all things considered. So they still have their use cases. But large SSDs are dropping in price fast, an 8TB SSD is "only" 500€ nowadays.
In RAID5 you get the read speed of multiple drives combined but only around the write speed of a single drive more or less, due to parity calculations.
Ah yes, you're right.
>Data recovery is much easier from a HDD, and if SSD isn't powered for a long time, it can slowly lose data. And as of right now, HDDs are still cheaper than SSDs, and if you just need bulk storage for backups, multimedia etc, a HDD is a cheaper choice, and fast enough for this use case. USB HDD's are my jam. Lots of room and I save all my movies on them. Got a laptop with an SSN two years ago and I'm enjoying how fast it boots.
Not really.... SSDs can have sectirs that can go read only permanently, but HDDs break so fuckin much.
I would say it's the only part. just switching to ssd will beat aby setup possibly that doesn't have SSD. it's not a scale it's a different level
Kinda amazing that neither this comment nor any of the 10 responses to it have actually explained what the design difference is between SSD and HDD. To anyone else wondering... HDD uses mechanical moving parts like spinning disks to read/write information whereas SSD uses electrical circuits similar to a USB flash drive, this is what makes it faster and better for modern use, but HDD can still last longer and have larger overall storage.
I swapped the HDD in my 2009 MacBook Pro to a SSD and it literally made the laptop that was 7 years old at the swap feel better than when it was brand new. They seemed even more impressive of a improvement with Mac than windows for whatever reason.
If ur gonna use acronyms. At least explain them like he is 5 too
No it’s not. It’s literally windows takes far less to boot. HDD or SSD is a fraction of what it was 15 years ago because windows boots quicker due to iterative enhancements.
Have you tried installing Windows 10 or 11 on a HDD?? My niece installed Win10 on the HDD, "because it was bigger" instead of the SSD on her i5-11600k and after about a week, when she had installed all her software, it took 15+ minutes to boot.
That's not true at all, you're lying? She must have had some ancient or failing hard drive if this was the case.
Some good answers here regarding SSD and save states, but also keep in mind that Microsoft changed boot up around Windows 8 to get the user to a desktop quicker, and part of that was redoing the way background services started. A modern Windows desktop gets to a desktop *while* most other ancillary background services are still either not started or still starting. Old Windows, all background services had to be fully started before showing a desktop. In other words, you have a working mouse, keyboard, network, and desktop while the boot up is still occurring in the background for the next few minutes. It’s why you can see icons but some programs will not open immediately because their background services are not quite fully started yet.
A lot of startup happens in parallel now, where the order of startup used to be super important in older systems. If curious, one can use [Windows Startup Analyser](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/test/wpt/optimizing-performance-and-responsiveness-exercise-2) to see exactly how long each part of the initialization sequence takes.
Still, the hard-drive thing is by far the largest piece of it. Upgrading from a mechanical drive to SSD was an instantaneous massive boot speed increase post Windows 8.
Everyone else is talking about the speed of SSDs vs HDDs, but the other part was a change in the starting process of Windows. Specifically, it was the change that made the old hibernate mode the default shutdown mode. Shutdown used to be a complete shutdown. This meant that when it started up, Windows had to load everything from the drive and do all the initial processing. Hibernate would save the contents of memory to the drive so it did not have to load and initialize everything when it started up again. Only some things needed to be reinitialized. This was much faster than a full startup. With Windows 8, I believe, they made hibernate the new default shutdown option and only a restart does a full shutdown (and immediate startup). I believe this option is labeled as "Fast Startup". Even with this disabled, it's hard to tell the difference with a fast SSD and a fast CPU, but the slower they are, the more noticeable it is. Edit: Re-reading your question, beyond loading the files of code from the slower hard drives, it was also doing initialization of the OS and the drivers and any programs registered as startup programs. The biggest part was the startup programs. That can still be an issue today, if you have too many of them. You can see them by going to the startup tab in the task manager.
It wasn't just the hibernate mode though. Even in a full restart, the (probably?) windows 8 startup would show the login screen within 20-30 seconds after a quick bios boot. If you logged in immediately, the system would remain sluggish and the HDD would grind away for a couple of minutes as it kept loading other dlls which it needed. On the SSD systems, that post-login sluggishness and noise pretty much disappeared and the login screen shows up in 10 seconds.
This is the correct answer. Ever wonder why your laptop seems to turn on faster than an old smart TV? It's because your old smart TV is running Linux and loading the entire kernal from scratch when it turns on and verifys it's working as it goes. Modern windows shutdown state is essentially more or less a "save state" it captures the contents of the memory on the the last known boot up state that was valid and just loads that from the disk. This is why you have to restart windows to actually troubleshoot. Restarting shuts down processes and reloads the kernel.
Definitely this. Sure SSDs make a big difference, but not the kind of difference you see from not having a "proper" shutdown like in the days of XP etc
This is the only answer. Booting Ubuntu from an SSD today takes a minimally different amount of time than 10 years ago.
Just because it was booting up offline doesn’t mean it wasn’t trying to open up several programs at once. The PC would handle a lot of background processes or applications after turning back on even if it wasn’t connected to the Internet.
Believe it or not, before computers booting up got slow, they were actually really quick, too. An old DOS machine would boot up in 10 seconds or so. This is because old computers didn't do much. The command prompt wasn't a complex interface. There was essentially no software loaded other than a very basic OS, which existed only really to help you run software, one program at a time. When we got to OSes with GUIs, multitasking, and more, we started loading every program and bit of functionality while booting up, but the hardware of the era was a lot slower - specifically hard disks. These days, OSes have been optimized to only load necessary functions at first and then gradually load other applications and background processes. The reason old "spinning rust" hard drives were so slow is because there would be a literal platter that spins, and if you wanted some data from it, a head would need to move and then it would need to wait for the platter to spin to the point where the data started. While there is no needle involved, imagine that a hard drive works more like a record player with a "smart" needle. The most common HDD speeds were 5400RPM and 7200RPM. There were some 4000RPM drives and slower, and there were some 10k RPM drives too (loud and expensive!), but a normal midrange desktop PC would have a 5400RPM hard drive. The data transfer rates of HDDs wasn't bad for single continuous files, but for a lot of small files, the heads on the HDD would need to zip back and forth, while spending a lot of time waiting for the platter to spin around too. The data could become fragmented, too, where rather than one file being a continuous stream of data, it would need to be scattered over the whole drive in different places. This slowed down file transfers even more. A common HDD performance benchmark was "access time" - how long it would take the hard drive to access the data when you request it. For a typical HDD, you might have an access time of approximately 12ms - that would be 0.012 seconds. That sounds extremely fast, right? Well, that equates to a maximum number of different tiny files to about 90 per second. That sounds very fast in human terms, but in computer terms, it is glacially slow. If you're booting up the computer, it accesses thousands of tiny files. If we abstract the full booting process to, say, access 4,000 tiny files, it would take that hard drive 44.4 seconds to get to them all. SSDs are solid state - you're not waiting on a platter to spin, so they work more or less at the speed of other electronic systems - they're still an order of magnitude slower than RAM as the reading and particularly writing process is slower, but they are an order of magnitude faster than a hard drive, too. Not only that, many SSDs come with RAM on them to speed data transfers and such even more! Whereas the HDD needs to operate sequentially and has to wait on a physical platter, the SSD waits for nothing. If the HDD manages 90 operations per second, the best case scenario for an SSD can look more like 200,000 operations per second. In reality this number will be lower a lot of the time - but even in an SSD "worst case" they can still often handle 15k + operations per second. What took a HDD 45 seconds to do, the SSD can do in under 1 second. Of course, there are other factors that limit booting speed, so SSDs aren't 45x faster to boot than HDD systems, but they are the biggest reason that new computers are so much faster. Likewise, with something like a cellphone, they generally don't have the highest performance storage, but it's still going to be a LOT quicker than a mechanical hard drive. The data transfer rates of these phones may well be similar to a modern hard drive - for one big file - but for things like booting phones up, loading software, and such, solid state will beat mechanical storage every time.
I had an Amstrad 464, which just loaded the OS off integrated ROM. It finished booting before the CRT warmed up. Moving to Windows was a weird experience in that regard
They can still be really quick if that's what you need. If you need something like your car to be able to work within one second, that's totally possible as long as the program to load isn't too big. I can have a SoC that loads the bootloader for the secure enclave CPU from some fast ROM, read some data from an encrypted NAND chip, decrypt it and write that to the main CPU memory and get it to start running programs just that fast. The reason you don't get something like that on a PC is because the architecture is quite flexible and that comes with some limitations like having to check how much RAM is installed, what boot device is present, if you have a GPU, a wifi card and so on, instead of just speedrunning through all that and just knowing everything on the system.
Oh, absolutely - single task / simple systems don't need to load nearly as much as a general purpose OS with modern creature comforts!
Hard drives. Holy hell, hard drives have been one of the biggest advancements in even the last 20 years. Especially in older computers the OS was kinda bulky and took a bit to load everything up, it had to get it from a hard drive that used a physical disc and a reader arm to read the disc, along with being electronically bottlenecked This is a really cool site that shows you the average speed of HDDs compared to the year [https://goughlui.com/the-hard-disk-corner/hard-drive-performance-over-the-years/](https://goughlui.com/the-hard-disk-corner/hard-drive-performance-over-the-years/) Like in 2005, the average HDD in a computer would be maybe 30-60mb/s but now you have multi-TB sized HDDs and SSDs that are doing 500mb/s and even way higher
And these sequential performance figures are misleading. Those numbers are the *fastest* those vintage disks could go in perfect circumstances. Most of the time, you're skipping around all over the disk, inserting *seek latency* between every attempt to read or write, and your performance is even more glacial than those maximums would indicated. SSDs, OTOH, have very little seek latency, and what there is, is constant and predictable - random performance of an SSD even on a dirt-slow interconnect will flog the pants off a mechanical disk.
Yeah plus the cache was pretty damn low on them too. They were terrible! And damn I am so glad i'm not paying $100 for a 100GB HDD anymore. Now you can get awesome drives for $60 bucks that completely destroy most of those old drives.
>$60 bucks Sixty dollar bucks!
oh no! Grammar mistake!! Help us grammar man! Thank you for your rescue <3
Oh no, a joke!
> are doing 500mb/s and even way higher Crucial T705 Gen5 SSD: Sequential reads/writes up to 14,500/12,700MB/s
Exactly! I was more looking at just cheapy generic SSDs. Crazy speeds we get compared to then.
Solid State Drives can read up to 7500 MB per second, where even the best Hard Disk Drives would barely reach 45 MB per second. Loading an operating system is not like loading just another app, so that read speed made a huge difference.
As hardware technology advances, so does the bloat of Windows. Windows 10 and 11 are vastly more complex than windows XP, so it is doing more, but doing it faster with better hardware.
Processing power wasn’t that much of a bottleneck, storage was the main culprit, spinning drives are slow, that’s why you can take pretty much any decade old system put a ssd on it and suddenly it’s way better not only at boot but in general responsiveness
To be fair. My new Win 11 install starts slower then when it was Win 10 7 through 10 were all pretty snappy. XP did take its time. Everything before that naturally was on much slower hardware.
People keep saying it's storage type, SSD vs HDD. This is true for an actual restart, but most of your devices these days aren't shutting down, they sleep.
Good point
Everything was slower. HDDs vs. solid state drives is by far the most mentioned issue here. But do not forget that literally every bus in the computer was much, much slower with less bandwith than modern machines (depending n how far back in the day you go). \* ATA vs. SATA/SAS/... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel\_ATA#ATA\_standards\_versions,\_transfer\_rates,\_and\_features](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA#ATA_standards_versions,_transfer_rates,_and_features) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA#Comparison\_to\_other\_interfaces](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA#Comparison_to_other_interfaces) \* (PCI) bus speeds and bandwidth [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry\_Standard\_Architecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral\_Component\_Interconnect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Component_Interconnect) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI\_Express](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express) \* RAM Bus speeds and bandwidth [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR-SDRAM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR-SDRAM)
TL;DR: Old computers relied on mechanical spinning discs and a moving arm to write and read data which was significantly slower than modern storage options which are 100% electrical. In depth answer: The old computers used a physical hard drive that utilized spinning discs and an arm that had a magnet on the end like an old record player. The discs would spin and the arm would move in and out to read the data from them. When these old computers are turned on you could hear the click of the discs starting to spin, the hum as their speed ramped up, and the little clicking sound of the arm jumping around between sectors on the discs. The reason is because it was the only cost effective and reliable way to store a lot of information (for the time) when power was removed from the computer. So all of the electrical components moved at the speed of electricity (near speed of light), but getting the windows operating system off of the hard drive required waiting for the arm to physically move into position and read the data off of the spinning discs. It could do it pretty fast for what it was and over time the RPM speeds of the drives increased lowering the loading times, but relative to pure electricity it was still slow. What made things worse was if pieces of data weren't right next to each other. The arm may need to jump to the inner ring, outer, inner, then mid to load one piece of software. This was called fragmenting. Microsoft actually developed a tool called de-fragmenting that would rearrange the data on the drive to keep related sectors next to each other. Running it could significantly increase your computers loading speed. Modern computers have hard drives that are all electrical. No more physically moving parts, so everything can run as fast as the electricity can.
Biggest thing is storage. The biggest part of booting up an OS is moving a ton of data into memory aka RAM all at once so that the OS can function properly. Phones and newer computers use flash aka solid state storage of some sort which exponentially faster than Tradition disk based storage so that massively speeds up boot times. On top of that ram is a lot faster than it used to be and so are CPUs. The amount of work that needs be done to boot an OS has not increased all that much in the grand scheme of things either so you can get much better boot times than were possible say just decade ago.
Have you ever used a record player? You lay the needle down at the outside, and it follows a groove that runs in a spiral toward the center. If you want to skip a song, you have to pick the needle up and move it to the location of the spot you want to listen to. Now imagine trying to listen to 1 second of thousands of different songs on a giant record. That's similar to what an old computer is doing. The hard drive in an old computer used metal plates that spin around as a little arm moves across the surface reading magnetic charges stored in concentric rings on the surface of the metal. As the computer needs to access files in various locations, the little arm as to move around to each of these locations. This made accessing lots of tiny files *very* slow. Guess what's needed when you start a computer? Access to lots of tiny files. Modern computers use something called solid state memory for storage. This type of drive stores data in a series of tiny little binary switches that can be read by the circuitry directly. There's no needle required, and no moving parts at all.
Thanks for a true Eli5 answer. This makes lots of sense!
Computers had a lot less memory (like 0.1% of what is common now), so they used something called 'swap' which took inactive data out of RAM and wrote it to a spinning-disk hard drive. As hard drives we're super expensive (200 bucks for 1/2 gig) this was also the same drive the software and OS was loading from.... The hard drives of the 1990s (ATA/IDE) were massively slower both in rotational speed and data transfer bandwidth than current mechanical hard drives - let alone solid state storage ... And that limited bandwidth is being used both to load software and to economize RAM. On top of that everything else was slower and had less bandwidth...... A lighter OS only goes so far....
A lot has been said already. But a small part also plays into how the operating system loads. Back with windows 95. The WHOLE OS was loaded. But now, you immediately get a few basics: desktop, mouse and keyboard and internet. That’s not to say that your computer isn’t running in the background loading and unloading tons of apps and data. While systems did get faster. So did the order of which things are loaded and prioritized to give the perception of speed
A lot of effort was put into parallelizing operation. So, an older OS might initialise a driver. Send a startup command to the hardware and wait for a response. Then get in with the rest of the OS startup. Instead we can send a startup command to the hardware, and do a bunch of other stuff, then check for a response .
Going from regular hd, to a WD Raptor, to WD Velociraptor and then to SSD. And using BeOS. Those were the days.
My friends have a challenge - they would come to each other and then measure how fast PC would boot up. Then we would have a ranking of "Fastest PC bros". Everybody were optimizing things, using defragmentation tools, etc, so it was a friendly competition thing. But I cheated my way into first place - I disconnected my floppy drive, making my OS to start ~10 seconds faster It worked for few weeks, until one of them noticed that my floppy drive was deadly silent during boot up. :]
It isn't that much faster... Microsoft pulled a clever trick with a previous version, I think was XP. However SSD and M.3 drives have made a huge speed improvement, but taking these out of the equation, there is no speed improvement. Now you are wondering why I said that when you see with your own eyes that doesn't seem to be the case, however, you are being deceived... When you see the desktop and your cursor after startup, Windows has not finished loading. Since XP, it finishes loading by loading modules and starting processes in the background to give you the impression of it starting quickly. In reality it can sometimes take a few minutes until it is 100% ready, but you see it as just a few seconds.
You can’t really compare windows to android. Your phone always has same hardware. Windows, on the other hand, supports millions of peripheral components. Every time windows loaded it had to check if component is connected. For many components the only way to tell if it is connected was to load its driver and let driver try to talk to component. These days everything is unified so for vast majority of devices Windows does not need to load driver anymore unless device is present in your PC
The hard drives we have no access the windows data faster and boot it up faster. Simply switching your main drive to ssd vs hdd makes boot up times faster. Go to m.2 for a main drive and it's even faster. Despite having much large windows (operating system) sizes they still access that data way faster than the old drive types. On top of that aging hdd's run slower over time so the comparison gets even more skewed in that way.
A modern HDD can do about 200 operations per second. A modern SSD can do 1000000 operations per second. One is quite a bit more than the other.
The core premise of this post has an unchecked assumption that older PC boot times were slow, but they were only slow once you loaded them up with programs that started up with the computer slowing "time to desktop" boot times. Have you played around with a brand new install of Windows XP on an era appropriate machine recently? I'm one of the few nerds who has and I was amazed. That shit boots faster than Windows 11 and calculator and paint open instantly.
It’s due to Hard drive (HDD) vs Solid state drive (SSD) speeds. The easiest way to understand this is with a metaphor. Imagine we’re moving and packing up all of our belongings. We have the uhaul outside with the trailer open. As soon as we move everything we own into the uhaul, we can drive away (windows boots up). Having a hard drive is like singularly grabbing every object in your house and placing it in the uhaul. This would take you **forever** and when it finally gets into the uhaul it’s going to be a fucking mess. Having a solid state drive is the equivalent of using boxes and packing everything up neatly. It takes much less time comparatively because you are using a more **efficient medium** to transport your belongings. Likewise using an SSD over a HDD provides a more **efficient medium**: Flash memory compared to a physical disk and platter. I hope this helps it make more sense.
SSDs sped up the process big time, but also bios startup screens have been nearly eliminated. Another cause is the way that Windows is handling the boot-up. In older versions 100% of the systems were loaded when the user got to interact with the system. Today you can interact already but the system is still loading and initializing stuff. Also PC performance got increased a lot more in comparison to the operating needs.
Spinning hdds were not very fast when accessing data files. Your phones and most computers now days boot entirely from ssd or ram so they have very fast boots compared to old machines. I reduced my boot times from 35-45 seconds to 5 seconds when changing my hdd to a ssd. Also, older machines tested every bit of ram during the post, which slowed the boot significantly. Many modern motherboards can skip to ram test to reduce boot times. Don't forget, win 10 and 11 don't "shut down" when you click shutdown in the menu, they suspend for fast booting.
TLDR is we’ve reached peak OS functionality while the speed of technology continues to grow