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?
In: Technology
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.
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