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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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Spindle hard drives that can’t access and retrieve data as quickly as modern solid state storage devices can.
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.
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