Lenovo + Windows 7 = Speed
Let’s face it. Other than machines like the ThinkPad W700, Lenovo machines aren’t known for their speed. Most of the time the reviews I read say “average performer” or some variant thereof.
Many of our business customers don’t care about benchmarks as Microsoft Office is fast enough as it is. But nearly everyone wants faster boot and reboot speed. They also want their system to shut down and suspend faster.
Rebooting is a fact of life. Install a new piece of hardware and odds are that you’ll have to reboot. If Adobe decides to push down the fifth Acrobat security patch in a week, you’ll have to reboot. Sun Java updater – reboot. Anti-virus patch that goes beyond virus updates, reboot.
You get my point.
Now imagine you’re a corporate user whose IT team has just rolled out a full hard drive software encryption product. Statistically you’ve got a 3 year old notebook with a 5400 rpm drive running Windows XP. I pity you. Your average boot time just went from 3.5 minutes to over 6. Your shutdown takes three minutes. You reboot an average of three times per week. In other words, in round numbers, waiting for your PC to shut down and start up is costing you an hour of your life per work week.
Conservatively, $20/hr. employee x 1 hr/week lost productivity x 4 hours/month x 12 months/year, means that you’re paid $960 a year just to wait for your PC. Your company has a thousand workers just like you and is therefore wasting just under $1 million per year because none of them can work done because they’re all waiting for their PCs. No wonder coffee at the office canteen costs so much. Your company has to recoup the cost of all of you not doing anything. (Corrected to fix a stupid math error. Thanks MathGuy!)
Even in a Windows 7 world, reboots are not going away, but they can be made significantly faster. To that end, our software engineers have been hard at work tuning our preload so that Lenovo machines running Windows 7 will have some of the lowest boot and shutdown times in the industry.
At Intel’s Developer Forum last week, the Phoenix BIOS team showed a proof of concept system which loaded Windows 7 in under 10 seconds! I doubt your ThinkPad will be quite that fast, but personally, I’m able to reboot in well under a minute using our standard customer preload.
Take a look at the scale of these improvements below. Since our preloads and benchmarks are not yet final, I had to cut off the scale of these charts (sorry). But even just looking at the length of the lines tells a good story.
- T400s (notebook) – Using an SSD will give you the best performance overall – even better than most desktops.
- SL410 (notebook)– This machine used a spinning drive and boot time was reduced by about one third.
- A58/M58e (desktop) – Compared to running XP, boot time is cut roughly in half
- M58p (desktop) – This is our vPro enabled desktop tuned more for corporate stability/manageability than speed. Still, using Windows 7 makes this class of machine scream.
The Intel Developer Forum example above suggests some BIOS tweaks you can do to speed up your boot time. First, if you’re a home user and have a Centrino Pro or vPro system, go into BIOS and turn off iAMT (vPro) support. On a corporate network, vPro can provide significant benefits. For a home user, it’s worthless. By doing so, you’ll save about 2 seconds of boot time.
While you’re in BIOS, look at your boot device list. Do you REALLY still need your system to search for an LS-120 drive on startup? How about that USB floppy? All an average user really needs is boot support for DVD drives, USB memory sticks, and their HDD. Your system will go through line by line of each of these items until it finds something with a boot sector. This adds boot time.
If you’re a Lenovo user, you can usually just set the system to boot from the HDD only. If you need to boot from a memory stick (or anything else) you can always press F12 when you turn your system on and boot from anything you’d like.
Last, if you don’t need serial or parallel port support, turn those off too. They’re legacy ports which require certain amounts of hardware initialization in a specific order which also takes time. I can’t promise you’ll notice the difference, but why encumber yourself if you don’t have to?
Oh, and one last thing – if you’re running a modern system with Windows 7, in my opinion, don’t bother with Microsoft’s “Hybrid Sleep” or hibernation any longer. On the rare times I turn my system off, I’ve found that rebooting my system is far faster than coming out of hibernate. Plus I get the benefits of a fresh start. I suspect you’ll notice the same.
September 28th, 2009 at 3:21 am
As a Linux user I have to ask “what is a reboot?” (Smiley)
We do get slower suspend/hibernate largely because of a switching out of graphics mode to go back to sleep and then switching back into graphics mode when resuming. (This adds a couple of seconds over Windows.)
I do ask that you remember your loyal Linux users. For anything you implement please do them in a “standards” way (ie what is conventional for x86) and document anything notable so the Linux community can implement them too.
September 28th, 2009 at 3:55 am
Why do you recommend against hibernate/hybrid sleep? Hibernate allows you to keep all your applications running in the same state you left them in. That is a big win. And, if the newer systems can shutdown and boot faster than they can hibernate/wake up, then that is a sign that there’s a problem with hibernate/wake up in those systems.
I recommend running your tests again, but also include the time needed for the user to navigate to their most recently opened Word/Excel document and their last opened web pages. I think you’ll see that powering on/off is nowhere near as fast as hibernating, simply because the slowest part is the user intervention.
I have been running Windows 7 RC on my T60 (2613-EAU) with a Hitachi 7k320 disk drive and Lenovo’s beta Windows 7 drivers for months. Previous to that I was using Vista and XP. I never shut down my computer; I always use hibernate. I only reboot when Windows Update demands it (i.e. once a month or less). On my system, a shut down and boot up has never been close to being as fast as a hibernate/wake up.
September 28th, 2009 at 4:19 am
does the future releases of thinkpad laptop will allow users to boot off SD cards, etc?
September 28th, 2009 at 4:30 am
I put mine to sleep and almost never shut down or hibernate. Anyway I always though Vista was slower than XP. And it actually is for most users.
The article juggles single users and corporate. The gains are measured for corporations but the optimizations mentioned are for single users. My W500 with Vista x64 and 4GB rebooted in 46s with a fingerprint sensor working (measured with BootTimer) so the work that Lenovo is doing now will not affect me at all, right?
Also check your math. 1 hour a week, 4 hours a month, then back again to 48 weeks a year? It should be 4 hours a month x 12 moths or 1 hour a week times 48 weeks. Either way it is 48 hours lost in a year which makes $960 a year!!!
September 28th, 2009 at 4:58 am
I have T400s with Vista Business installed on it. Will I receive a free upgrade to Windows 7 when it is available?
However, this is not that important. My Vista boots for ~45sec, but Ubuntu 9.04 boots for ~20sec. I haven’t measured the Linux boot time, but that’s the feeling I get
September 28th, 2009 at 5:33 am
I have switched from XP to Fedora Linux on my Z61p.
No more hangs, no more crashes, no need to reboot just to keep the system from slowing down.
But when I do reboot, it is insanely fast compared to what it used to be. Time has been cut by more than 75 %, i.e. it is twice as fast as Vista, according to your numbers!
Now, my Z61p has been a good friend for almost 3 years. It is time to move on, and i am thinking about buying a W700, and one with lots of RAM and RAID and the Wacom tablet.
However, if it means abandoning Linux because it will not work properly, this upgrade will not happen. I might set it up as dual boot, to use Photoshop, but Linux will continue to be my main OS in the foreseeable future.
September 28th, 2009 at 6:34 am
Until SSDs come in nice packrat-sized drives, I’d imagine that 7200rpm drives would be best — are there numbers for those?
Sadly they don’t seem to come in large numbers of capacity sizes.
September 28th, 2009 at 7:09 am
“Plus I get the benefits of a fresh start. I suspect you’ll notice the same.”
What about the benefits of a running session? Cold starting 2-3 Adobe applications, the browser, the mail client, and especially 3ds max takes much longer than the boot itself, but warm starts are significantly quicker.
Maybe Win7 is better in loading frequently used programs, I don’t know.
That said, quicker boot is always a good thing. My T42p needs over 5min to boot.
September 28th, 2009 at 7:46 am
I got X200T tablet. I hope Lenovo will relase BIOS update that takes only 10 secs on full startup. I got SSD and bios load up takes a lot of time. I dont see any advantage even with SSD.
I missed Windows 7 update because my laptop was shipped earlier than its estmimated shipping date
It was only one day before program started. Nobody helped me with this. I lost something like 350USD …
Please dont turn back on me this time !
September 28th, 2009 at 8:54 am
Wow, the full disk encryption products you folks are familiar with must really suck! I’ve been using disk encryption for most (but perhaps crucially, not all) of my hard disk for years and years. My thinkpad is an X40 which has an even *slower* hard drive, order 4000rpm, and my boots take about a minute (not 6!). I use Linux, and encrypt only my /home and RAM (equivalent of %USERPROFILE% or C:\Users\Joe Bloggs in Windows, I think). But that’s where all the writes go to anyway. If my laptop was stolen the thief could see what software I had installed.
September 28th, 2009 at 9:05 am
Thanks for the little BIOS tweak tips. However, I too wholeheartedly disagree on the hibernate thing (and I rarely need to reboot). Windows 7, for the most part, is stable enough that a “fresh start” is rarely needed these days and coming out of hibernation with more than a half-dozen applications immediately ready to do your bidding is still faster than booting, logging in, opening up all your applications, loading your documents, web pages and etcetera.
September 28th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Lenovo’s nice! This is all very nice and very good, but what about those who are older machines? I have a ThinkPad T61. At the machine will have a new BIOS and new optimized drivers and software? Or I (and many other Others) may only benefit from new experience, if you buy a new machine?
September 28th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
“$20/hr. employee x 1 hr/week lost productivity x 4 hours/month x 48 weeks/year, means that you’re paid $3,800 a year just to wait for your PC.”
Uh – Your math is wrong. The multipler by 4 hours/month should be removed (or, equivalently, change 48 weeks/year to 12 months/year). The corrected total is $960.
As a side note, a premium 4:3 aspect ratio display (like my wonderful T61) matters more to me than reboot times.
September 28th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
[...] He also shares some tips on decreasing boot times with BIOS tweaks, which I suggest you take a gander [...]
September 28th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Roger, the additional seconds you mentioned when suspending should be a thing of the past after kernel (graphics) mode setting has become standard across linux distros. I *think* intel graphics + a bleeding edge distro (Fedora11, Ubuntu9.10) will do kms out of the box already, although I haven’t looked too deeply into it.
Anyway, there seems to be a lot of rebooting going on in windows land.
September 28th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
I don not think that windows (either Vista or 7) have to reboot that frequently nowadays. Normally I reboot my system about once in a month after windows update. I do not thing that linux users do much better than that. They to must update their kernels from time to time and there may be other reasons for rebooting besides that (you change something in the configuration of your system, for example).
Anyway, I do not think that boot time is that important nowadays. What is more important than that is fast recovering from sleep mode or hibernation (I still prefer hibernation in spite of what Matt said about it).
September 28th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
As mentioned above, please don’t forget your Linux users!
There really isn’t much on a Linux system that requires a reboot after updating (although you do have to occasionally restart some services or applications). Even Kernel updates can happen without rebooting these days (look up KSplice).
Nonetheless, the Linux world is improving boot times impressively too – I think Windows 7 will be boot king until the next major batch of Linux releases in Q1 2010. Competition is healthy!
That aside, with all OS boot times dropping dramatically, the BIOS POST is now becoming a significant portion of the total boot time, and it certainly doesn’t have to be that way. Coreboot shows what it possible:
http://www.coreboot.org/Welcome_to_coreboot
Suspend and hibernate are slightly slower on Linux, but that should be fixed with Kernel Mode Setting, coming soon.
Disk encryption really should happen in hardware (as it does on most of your nice vPro hardware) – software encryption is a real performance killer. On Linux it’s possible to encrypt just the user’s home directory (equivalent to Documents & Settings in Windows) so that applications can still operate at full speed, but users’ documents are encrypted. Of course major file operations in the home directory perform poorly, but that’s generally a rare use case so it’s a decent compromise if encryption hardware is lacking. See
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p.....&num=1
I would like to see Lenovo help out making battery performance on Linux as good as it is on Windows – this is a real sore point at the moment (especially for users of the latest T and X series models).
September 28th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
My x200 Tablet w/ SSD (64gb Samsung SLC) isn’t quite as good as the T400s, but I can definitely perform a full shutdown/restart cycle in well under a minute with Win7.
Thanks for the tip about vPro as well, that seemed to shave off a couple of seconds. Not sure about removing the other devices from the boot order, but I’ll give it a shot.
I also am in agreement about disabling Hibernate. I have found that my SSD equipped system is able to perform a shutdown/restart cycle in about half the time of a hibernate/resume cycle. I presume this is due to the fact that hibernate has to write out 4GB of RAM, and then read it back to resume. Windows startup doesn’t have to touch this much data. As a result, I disabled hibernate, recovered my 4GB of precious SSD space, and use standby for instant resume or full shutdown if I don’t plan on using the machine for a few hours.
The one downside of these fast drives and quicker loading operating systems though is it makes the general initializations seem really slow. It takes about seven seconds from pressing the power button for the ThinkPad logo to show up (plus another 5-7 to start loading Windows) and about five seconds more for the fingerprint reader to initialize once the Windows logon screen is shown. I would say those are the areas that need attention next (an infinitely fast drive is unlikely to fix those problems).
September 29th, 2009 at 12:44 am
[...] Link: Inside the Box » Blog Archive » Lenovo + Windows 7 = Speed [...]
September 29th, 2009 at 3:08 am
My pc is an ordinary 3000H series system,The first one lenovo introduced in India.Indeed the boot times vary from OS to OS.Windows vista takes 4 mins to boot into the login screen.Fedora 11 which i am currently using takes approximately 12 seconds to get there!
We all know how the bloated vista takes long times to start and shutdown.May be it should have provided windows 7 as a free upgrade to vista’s users.
September 29th, 2009 at 4:57 am
I have to disagree with your last point. I have a T500, with 3GB RAM, and it wakes up quite fast from hibernation, much much faster than a restart. Anyway, can someone tell me when are thinkvantage tools arriving, and which of them are required by home users, recommendations?
September 29th, 2009 at 5:42 am
… and another happy linux user with boot times orders of magnitude faster than my colleagues running XP (and especially Vista) …
But more to the point, suspend and hibernate matter because they keep application state. I almost never reboot (ok, about once a fortnight when sometimes the docking station and my sleep state don’t get on …) and that’s not about speed (although for the record, it’s fast enough I don’t notice it …
What is slow, still, is waiting to get past the Lenovo startup to get to the linux boot … (this is on a three year old T60P with a third party SSD).
September 29th, 2009 at 8:33 am
My Vista boots for ~55sec, but Ubuntu 11.48 boots for ~26sec. My pc is an ordinary 3000H series system,The first one lenovo introduced in India.
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September 29th, 2009 at 9:13 am
Well, I just hope that the Win 7 Lenovo Enhanced Experience truly works and that you can upgrade your old PC with it!!
September 29th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
When I upgraded to Windows 7 on my T400, I did a fresh install with an MSDNAA/Retail disc and used ThinkVantage System Update to get my drivers.
Waking from sleep is INCREDIBLY fast. I would say it rivals the incredibly fast wake-up speeds that Macs enjoy.
Because I use it throughout the day, the extremely minimal amount of power that the system uses while it’s in sleep mode is fine.
September 30th, 2009 at 12:15 am
Hi I am getting more interesting to give Win7 a try. Anyone had exp using Win7 on their X60s model?
September 30th, 2009 at 10:53 pm
[...] to a few milliseconds ….. I love this stuff. Matt Kohut at our Inside the Box blog also delves deep into the boot time issue. [...]
October 1st, 2009 at 8:19 am
Dear Lenovo! It’s the old machines will be fine? I like: T61. (X61, etc …) please Answer!
October 1st, 2009 at 10:37 am
Gunston and others,
There is a lot of info for installing Win 7 on forum.thinkpads.com
http://forum.thinkpads.com/vie.....acecb4c8a2
and perhaps also forums.lenovo.com
October 1st, 2009 at 11:47 am
Dear Lenovo! It’s the old machines will be fine? I like: T61. (X61, etc …) please Answer!
October 1st, 2009 at 3:22 pm
[...] Oct012009 .Inside the Box Lenovo Blogs > Inside the Box · About · Rules « Lenovo + Windows 7 = Speed [...]
October 2nd, 2009 at 5:19 am
To all — see the video post in the most recent post above this one which addresses more detail. Let us know in the comments what other questions you’d like us to address that the first video did not.
We are working on the answer of how much you can expect as an improvement if you just use our drivers and do not use our preload. My suspicion is that you will get the most benefits from using our preload.
Jon on FDE Drives — just about any security expert will tell you that encryping your user folders is better than nothing, but to get the best protection, you need to encrypt your entire HDD. People do not have the slowdown when their My Documents type of folders are encrypted, but when all bits on the HDD are encrypted.
I still stand by my contention that Hibernate is now a waste of time. I have a system with 8GB of RAM and it takes FOREVER to write and read that amount of data from the HDD. My applications like Lotus Notes work better after a reboot and they don’t take that long to launch. You can also just put everything in your startup folder and save yourself the effort of having to launch it manually.
Other than the beta drivers site, which you can find in your favorite search engine by typing in “Lenovo Windows 7 Beta Drivers”, the TVTs and full driver set arrive the day the Windows 7 announces later this month.
October 2nd, 2009 at 5:04 pm
I’m waiting for the TVTs… but I don’t think they will do. I’m on an elderly computer, a T43.
When I had a clean Win7 RC install on it a few months ago it rebooted real fast. Somewhere just over half a minute. But the real speedy thing was about sleep. Took long to go down into sleep, but waking from it was no more than the time it took me to write my password!
Now it’s not that clean anymore, a reboot is about 1,5 minutes. But sleep was just as fast (only depending on open programs), until I started to use my fingerprint reader. I’m using the inbuilt Win7 utility, and it’s a nightmare. It takes about 15 seconds to wake from sleep – if everything goes right. Most often it gets to the wrong login screen, not activating the fingerprint reader. I have to click “Switch user”, wait another ten seconds and then login. This may be due to still running build 7100.
And I’d like you to know Matt, that I’ve always shared your opinion on hibernation. But in XP I could turn it off, haven’t fixed that in Win7 yet. By the way, I’ve got “Reboot” as standard for my shutdown button on the start menu…
October 20th, 2009 at 7:25 am
I’m putting up the answer on Oct 22 in conjunction with the Win 7 launch.