Why did it take such a long time for windows to boot up back in the day compared to today’s operating systems?

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I understand that processing power was lacking but surely the os of yore must have had much smaller requirements. Also let’s assume we are booting up offline and no updates are indicated. What was Windows doing for 3 – 5 minutes that my android phone manages to zip through in 15 seconds?

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17 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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