PCs are getting faster every day, with more processing capacity and faster memories. However, we still have some starts, they are not instantaneous and they are not much different from what we had a decade or more ago. Why is PC booting taking so long? Shouldn’t that be much faster given the high speeds of SSDs?
You sit in the chair, turn on your computer with state-of-the-art components and although once everything is ready to be able to interact with it, we find that it takes at least a few minutes from the moment where we press the start button.
How does booting a PC work?
To understand the reason why your computer is starting up slowly and has barely moved in all this time, you need to understand how it works, because there are a series of startup steps that occur sequentially from We press press the power button until the operating system is loaded, be it Windows or Linux. In Apple’s case, they have an advantage because they don’t have to follow a common standard.
The boot sequence on all The PC first goes through the BIOS boot, whose information is usually found in very low speed ROM or flash memory. Once this has happened, what is done is to execute the MBR, which boots the hard disk or SSD on which we have installed the operating system to start loading it.
Ideally, the BIOS today would be in a much faster memory, like the NVMe SSD, however, if that were the case, if said memory failed, we would lose on boot. Apart from the fact that regulations and standards require that the BIOS can operate with very little power consumption compared to sleep mode.
Could the PC start instantly without pressing a button?
Well, for that we would need storage memory and RAM to be the same and therefore not having to dump data from storage to RAM via PCI Express, besides ignoring the latency issue with memory. That is, if we are talking about something instantaneous, that is, without waiting, because the technical limitations do not allow it to be done.
The additional problem is that HDDs are now the standard for computer storage, and high capacity SSDs don’t support as many write cycles over their lifetime. The ideal? Having an SLC type Flash memory with a large number of write cycles, low latency and high bandwidth that allows us to restart the PC where we left off. With this, there would be no need to turn off a computer 100% and turning it on would be a simple memory dump. However, if there is a total system crash, it should be restarted normally from the beginning. The good thing about this solution is that booting the PC can contain the BIOS and speed up the boot process.
