I remember computers used to take sooo long to start up, that you can press the power button and go make yourself a sandwich. What changed? Hardware got faster obviously, but software also got more complicated and there are more of them to load up no?
In: Technology
The biggest reason is that we have faster access to hard drives. This is both because we have Solid State Drives, which don’t use physical parts to read/write but instead are purely integrated circuits, and also because we have increased the speed at which data can get between the hard drive and the other system components.
In the days of old, your computer would start up, and it would need to load all the code needed to run the OS into memory, as well as various graphics that are needed for it. This would involve a lot of time spinning around on your hard drive.
Even though modern OS’s use more memory, it can be filled much faster.
In addition, there is also optimizations done in the way things are loaded. For instance, while you might start up Windows 10 bright and fast, it might not cache some graphics or sound files that it will be using until the last steps of startup. This might mean that for the first (very) small while, the OS doesn’t have all the lipstick that you’re used to in normal operation, but that doesn’t affect anything performancewise.
One additional thing is that some applications that run at startup try to not consume resources until you’re mostly idle. If you have something like a game launcher, it might not actually start trying to update your games until after the rest of the OS is started up. In older times, such an application could start working while the OS was still loading, increasing load on the system, and delaying that final OS startup sequence.
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