Diskeeper HyperBoot Speeds Booting — Do You Need It?
Tired of slow-booting computers? Diskeeper has a solution, although consumers can’t get it directly. It’s called HyperBoot and is only available on certain notebooks. Diskeeper recently announced a deal to put the HyperBoot solution on ASUS notebooks — the second such deal with the company. Neither ASUS nor Diskeeper specified which notebooks are part of this partnership, however. The solution apparently learns about a device’s boot sequence and subsequently gets faster as it learns. Even computer shutdown speed is increased and the boot time reportedly doesn’t degrade over time.
In a video demonstration of HyperBoot, two identical laptops are continuously booted up and shut down over a 17-minute span. The machine with HyperBoot is the clear winner, with 24 boot sequences over the 11 cycles of the notebook without HyperBoot. Clearly, the solution speeds up the boot and reboot process and I doubt any of us would turn down this kind of improved performance. But this begs the age-old question of booting vs. sleep/resume.
Using a mobile device with Microsoft Windows Vista or 7, it’s fairly efficient to utilize the native sleep function and wake up the machine as needed — and that function is much more stable than it was with Windows XP. The initial boot is the pain point, then, and if you’re not booting as often, how much value does a solution like HyperBoot add? We probably have good representation of those using the boot and shutdown approach, hibernation throughout the day or liberal use of sleep and wake. The choice probably varies due to the situation, but which of the three is your preferred method to manage your mobile device? I’m a sleeper, myself.
The laptop on the right has a problem. Prolly too much crapware on startup. My laptop boots faster than the laptop on the left. SO no, I don’t need it.
On A mobile device, Make it always on feature that use very low power when the screen is off. But put an option for Apps that you want still running while the screen is off.
For the most part, I sleep. Once in a while, I hibernate. I only find myself booting for patches and installs.
I only put my laptop to sleep, whether I’m going somewhere, or sleeping myself. In fact I’ve gone as long as a month without rebooting, although, yesterday I booted up because my laptop wouldn’t go to sleep for some reason.
Sleep for Linux, reboot for Windows. I have to reboot to play most of the games on my laptop, and I’d love a faster boot.
I rarely turn my computer off at all so I can see new chat messages, though.
Kevin, I hate to shoot you down- but they are currently conducting field trials on HyperBoot, prepping it for resale.
I’m bound by an NDA, so I cant discuss details- but I can tell you it WILL be a retail product, and from first-hand experience, it DOES work.
I run a large network, and I can tell you we will be purchasing this when we roll out Windows 7. When your talking about a ton of workstations, saving 1 minute per boot over 900+ machines equates to a lot of saved time each day.
The other thing to consider with Windows 7 and sleeping is that it doesnt always work reliably- and in order to apply security updates supplied by Windows update (or WSUS in my case), your computer (and all of mine) HAS to reboot.
It’s not only about security, it’s about reliability too. My company runs a lot of “crapplications” which leak memory. After a certain amount of time, these memory leaks will start to affect system performance, and eventually cause a meltdown. Getting rid of my “crapplications” isn’t optional- many of them are at the core of our business.
sounds like a very exciting product
Yes, I need it :D
Seriously, it’s a great for users who don’t leave their systems on all the time. I can actually see it being more attractive on desktops than laptops especially in a corporate environment where, as Slammin Salmon noted, time savings are always welcome.
I turn off my desktop most nights and I would like something that makes it boot faster in the mornings. I have several items in my startup list: Riva Tuner, Avira, Razer CP, Nvidia CP, Nokia PC Suite, G15 LCD applet, Spyder Color profile loader, Punkbuster etc etc, and I really don’t want to disable these; Hyperboot would be an excellent solution.
This is also an attractive to the non-techie crowd who cannot modify Services or the Startup list. ‘Install and forget’ solutions are the best for this user group.
I would like it. It’s only an expectation of mine to see today’s blazing-fast systems boot nearly instantly.
Why? I don’t really need it due to sleep/hibernate, but updating drivers inevitably means lots and lots of rebooting. (At the rate NVIDIA and ATI release graphics drivers, I end up having to do so at least once a month or two on my desktop.) If I’m lucky, it’ll just be once or twice. If I’m unlucky, it can be well over ten reboots before I get everything operating like it should, assuming the OS hasn’t been screwed up to the point of needing to reformat.
That’s a lot of time spent doing nothing but wondering if the system will work or not…
Right on Redstorm. I mean, if you start to do the math on a corporate environment- our average employee billing rate is 150.00 an hour (we’re a services company, but I wont get more detailed than that), so if I can save 900 minutes a day (assuming each machine only boots once (yeah right!), that’s 15 hours a day, or put into dollars, 2250.00 a day, 11,250 a week, or 585,000 a year!
I also agree on the RONCO “set it and forget it” methodology. I have found that DK’s defrag product is an invaluable tool on my machines- again, most of my users dont know what defrag does, or remember to take the time to manually kick it off. In the same respect, the vast majority of my users are not technical enough to tune their own machine. Hyper-Boot is smart enough to learn machine behavior, adapt to changes in the environment, and tweak it to optimize boot times.
And no, other than being a field tester, I have no associations with Diskkeeper :P
Gentlemen,
Thanks for the open dialogue.
While HyperBoot is currently only available for large scale deployment by ODM/OEMs (e.g. manufacturers out of Taiwan), the reach from both consumers and the enterprise has been huge.
As noted by Slammin’ Salmon—when you can shave 20 – 56% off the aggregate boot times in an enterprise scale environment, the cost savings is off the charts. But even on the consumer end, people want instant gratification out of the box. And computer manufacturers have to compete on that point alone. This is why you’re seeing it so widely deployed on Win 7 machines by folks such as ASUS. They want the maximum “out of the box” experience possible for their users.
But whether you’re a booter or sleeper, boot up time is a pain point. I don’t think any of us here would argue that. This is why HyperBoot is enjoying such reach and buzz right now.
We’ve filmed some other tests, with completely different systems and configurations. Expect to see those on YouTube in the coming weeks or months. The above video shows how the product is self-learning and can optimize or speed up on each reboot. The next one will demonstrate the latest edition of HyperBoot and what it can do in a single boot up, out of the box, with two systems side by side. The results are quite startling. So yes, it’s a real product with a lot of R&D and performance technologies to back it.
All the best,
Derek
Derek De Vette
Vice President
Global Alliances | Partner Affairs
Diskeeper Corporation
Derek,
It’s nice to see some official input. I cant wait to see the new vids…I’m really excited about this product, and sure hope it makes it to resale market in time for my Windows 7 deployment (tentatively scheduled in June). With 90% of truth being perception, I have a hard time selling my users something “better” that by all indications is slower. Shaving those 20 seconds off boot does make a big difference.
I’ve done quite a few “out of box” labs of my own.
In lab one, I put two identical machines side-by-side (and by identical, i mean same exact hardware, and a bit-for-bit copy of the HDD. The hardware was quite respectable – HP 8530w’s). The first laptop I installed Hyperboot on, and the other I didn’t. I then put both into endless reboot loops with auto-login and auto-restart enabled…by the time the one without Hyperboot made 4 reboots, the one with Hyperboot made 5. Overall, my testing indicated about a 20% reduction for a full reboot cycle on physical hardware.
I then took various breeds of virtual machines and repeated the same test. Parallels for Mac showed about the same increase. VMWare (ESX) showed the same boost. Windows 7 booting from WIM and VHD both echoed that result. It seemed no matter what I did, bare-bones Windows 7 had about the same gain in terms of percentage off “boot to desktop” times. With adaptive learning, those times should just get better.
I’ve also heard that the more heavily weighted with apps/services the system is, the bigger the difference between “no hyperboot” and “hyperboot” managed systems. Is there any truth to that?
Not at all. Delaying non-essential services does have its place for fine tuning (even Microsoft does it). But this is not the primary functionality of the HyperBoot product. Rather, we are optimizing the boot zone. Hence “boot time optimization software.”
If anything, those systems with excellent CPUs should see a dramatic performance gain from HyperBoot. As unlike our flagship Diskeeper product (which uses only idle resources to perform its operations), HyperBoot is intentionally using 100% of the resources to get you up and running as fast as humanly possible. Kind of like a muscle car. The more powerful the engine, the faster your 0 – 60 figure will be.
HyperBoot – reboot after BSoD 2 times faster ;)
As promised, here is the latest live lab test of HyperBoot boot time optimization technology in action.
As can be seen, the performance improvements are pretty dramatic. This is as of March 2010 with a newer version of the technology in action.