Randall Stross has a piece in the NYT bemoaning the slow boot time that’s still the rule for most machines. Even pushing it down to 30 seconds is too slow, and he’s absolutely right about that; in today’s world, we should all be able to get our information appliances up and running almost instantly, like our phones. That an iPhone (e.g.) can do this just makes system startups even more annoying, and it’s apparently annoying enough for Stross to give it significant space in the New York Times.
Except, of course, that he’s missed an important development. I don’t know what the state of these things is in Windows, since I haven’t used Windows as a main machine or a laptop in nearly a decade, but on my Mac, boot time is also slower than ideal (call it a minute). The thing is, though, that boot time is now irrelevant, since I never shut the machine down. I just unplug peripherals, shut the lid, and stick it in my bag. When I get where I’m going, I just open it again, and within a second or two I’m ready to roll. I haven’t actually shut down my laptop in months — and that was for a RAM upgrade. With increased stability and some clever work between hardware vendor and OS developer, this kind of sleep-stability (and its companion, constant availability) should be achievable by anyone — though if my Windows colleagues are any indication, sleep isn’t any more reliable in 2008 than it was in 1998. They’re all shutting down and rebooting every time they pack their computers up. My colleagues are smart people; I’m assuming that if sleep actually worked, they’d be using it.
Windows people, is it really still that broken? Is it reasonable for a nontechnical Windows person to keep his or her laptop booted in perpetuity, as I do with my Macbook Pro? I understand — and revel in! — the fact that Apple has a significant advantage here in owning both the hardware and the software, but surely this problem is solvable for the heterogenous Windows laptop world. What about the Linux folks (of whom I think there are maybe two here)?
I’m on Linux (Ubuntu) here. Sleep sort of works, but the system load after sleep is really high. Unfortunately, there’s a bug that renders the system unusable after sleep sometimes. That alone kills my wanting to put it into sleep. My system also periodically (at least once a week or so) either freezes with a blinking caps lock key or X becomes so unstable that it needs to be killed and restarted. Unfortunately, overall my linux machine is probably less stable than my desktop running WinXP. My wife’s MacBook is a model of stability; I have no clue if it’s been rebooted in a couple of months, and sleep/resume just works. What am I putting my Llinux machine through to render it so unstable? VMware, Firefox, email, and Eclipse.
I’m using XP on my work (HP) feater. This is the first machine that I have attempted to leave booted through sleep. It works about 80% of the time: it starts failing after 3 or 4 bedtimes and a hard boot is required. There have also been a variety of weirdnesses with Outlook (it’s grim?), but that may be unrelated instability.