Are these companies running PCs with 640 KB of memory or something? And if the PCs need to be powered off, why not just hibernate at the end of the day ...

Quote: "...until the user logs in, which is taking up to 15 minutes after the machine running Windows Vista has been turned on turned on thanks to the long boot cycle"

Eh? Shome mishtake, shurely? 15 minutes to boot an OS and log in as a user is bloody ridiculous! Even a fully-laden XP install shouldn't take more than 90 seconds from cold and a lean one a minute at most. W2K was a bit quicker.

For added productivity, let's all go back to DOS - about 10 seconds from pushing the power button to the command prompt as far as I remember with another 10 seconds for Locoscript to load.

Mine's the one with the 5¼-inch floppies in the pocket.

If its the end of your shift why are waiting till your computer turns off to leave ??? Why turn the computer off ???

Not a glitch. Companies who pay by the hour like that will do anything to trick their employees into logging less time than they actually work.

But 15 MINUTES for startup? WTF?

Why are they booting every day?

They SHOULD be docked their own time for booting a machine instead of using the sleep options.... although I know people here that do the same thing (but they get paid to watch the boot cycle, it is certainly more fun than watching paint dry since they are paid for the watching!).

I want to be on the jury, so I can laugh them out of court-- only in America can you (maybe) win a court case for being a old fashioned computer illiterate dummy.

Take that long, on a corporate PC that may have to run 6 apps, update antivirus and pull a roaming profile from a remote server.

If those PCs are either so misconfigured or so underpowered that it's taking 15 minutes, can you imagine how much time they waste all day long trying to use same system(s)?

Bill G., for knowing it's better to grab your coat than be handed your hat.

I hope the commie hating Americans grind these bolshi workers into the ground, losing money from boot times ? I think work shy hippies will come up with any excuse not to work !

I find it astonishing that I'm actually apologizing for Vista, but I have a copy on my home laptop, and it doesn't take anywhere NEAR 15 minutes to boot.

But then I looked at the claim again. They said "up to" 15 minutes.

1 minute satisfies that claim. As in "You can lose up to 20 pounds a DAY on our NEW FAT FREE DIET."

I don't buy it.

I can see calling for the IT manager's blood for specifying that Vista should be installed on machines that were obviously under spec, but you do lose the moral high ground if you get hysterical about it and just start lying.

15 minutes does sound a lot, but remember that these are the types of companies which install time-keeping software on their computers. Who knows what other stuff gets installed or scheduled as well? Mandatory virus scans or backups perhaps?

Not to mention network profiles (if I remember the name correctly) which, for users with a lot of large files, can take an AGE to load/save over a network. 15 minutes could well be considered optimistic in some cases!

"Are these companies running PCs with 640 KB of memory or something? And if the PCs need to be powered off, why not just hibernate at the end of the day ..."

Well, I worked at one call center, they had these old machines running like 98, 2000 on some, a few even 95. They put XP on all of them. some had like 64MB of RAM. Since they were just running a 3270 emulator app, it didn't matter too much but the bootup time was horrendous. (They were on when we came in, someone DID turn them on for us.. I found out how long they took after a power outage 8-) .)

They're probably running Vista on like 512MB systems or something. And could well not be slimming it down, I've seen a few "large deployment" XP or 2000 setups where they just load so many things into the system tray, it's just ridiculous. I've had 3 friends of mine use Vista (I think all have gone back to XP or diverted to Linux now...) independently recommended to me to have a MINIMUM of a Core2Duo, and 3GB of RAM. They got boxes with 2GB and found it sluggish until they dropped another gig in it.

I *have* seen an XP box take over 10 minutes to boot, no it wasn't spyware. It usually takes under a minute, it was pulling these group policy updates, software updates, etc. over a T1.. then applying them, which was also very slow. You shouldn't be that slow EVERY boot, but if they had some Active Directory setup that was very poor, it could slow down that much (it gets full load of EVERY machine loading at once, then nearly 0 load the rest of the time after all.)

IT? Just kidding this is certainly IT. I'd curse my systems if they were this slow.

...one of our guys has a six month old 64-bit AMD machine with 2G of RAM and simply task switching from, say, Photoshop to Zend Studio can take up to 30 seconds a time. I'd be a gibbering homicidal maniac after an hour or so of that nonsense. His machine is, no kidding, about a tenth the speed of the box I'm writing this on, which is a five year old 1500 MHz PIV with a gig of RAM. But then I'm running Ubuntu Dapper. I still use Mandrake 9.2 at work on an identical box and it's a sight faster. At least 25 seconds of the boot cycle is firing up the Adaptec Ultra160 SCSI card. A pure ATA configuration is POST to XDM login in 45 seconds.

What you guys are not keeping in mind is some of the utterly crap software riding on top of the OS in some cases. My job runs some software on top of the OS on a system with seriously insufficient memory, the system takes a tiny hair under 10 minute to reboot and get to where you would clock in if you actually had to boot it up every morning. Not something we normally do in my job, but any of you that are used to decently written software would be horrified at the stuff some corporations will pay for.

Poor sods I hope they win just to give the IT bosses a kick so sort it out. I can well believe the interval from power on to actually being able to do something being so long.

It takes my pc ten minutes from a cold start. That's running xp with 2Gig of memory. Actually the bit that takes the longest is some cisco networking/security software that takes 5 minutes to log the pc onto the lan. As for hibernating - well we all have laptops - to squeeze out that extra bit of productivity from us- and our security people insist all laptops are undocked and locked away or taken home at the end of the day. All very dumb and a great big pain in the arse. Makes me almost nostalgic for the days when I used a vt340....

I wonder how they got it to be that fast. I mean it _does_ need to copy gigabytes from an optical drive to the harddisk. Of course Microsoft could just speed things up, by making Windows run on read-only drives.

Vista: Oh strange time keeping software. Lets ask it a question. Are you safe?

TimeSoft: Er we are legion. We are custom programmed.

Vista: Oh I need to check the internet resource black list

TimeSoft: You dont get internet access until you are logged in

Vista: Oh I need to check the internet resource black list

TimeSoft: You dont get internet access until you are logged in

Yada yada yada. Not hard to see where all this starts and stops. Actually if you use roaming desktops as well log in times often increase.

A lot of corporations like to store an employee's Roaming Profile on a central server so that, no matter what computer they might log-in from, they are able to access their documents, short-cuts, email, etc.

Depending on the capabilities of the Profile storage server, having 100 or more employees all trying to log-in at once (like they would at the beginning of a shift) tends to bog it straight-down into the loo.

My previous employer finally had the mental-bulb click on after six months of yelling at us to "stop goofing off & get to work" each morning.

"Sorry, but until the system comes on-line, I can't *DO* anything at my station."

And it might take 5, 10, or even 15 minutes before the Profile server manages to serve up everyone's data.

Which means, until the Server lets the system know that I'm trying to log-in, I can't get to anything on the network in order to do my job.

And yes, that was every morning, Monday through Friday.

Going home was easier, because telling it to log-off meant I'm off the clock.

What it does after that point, I couldn't care less about.

WHY they shut the systems down each night, I have no idea, but if it meant a free 10 minutes each morning to "mentally prepare myself" to "get into gear", AND I got paid for it, then far-be-it for me to complain.

That's where they're getting angry.

They're at work, they're being told to do work-related things, but because their system hasn't finished logging them in (hence, they're not being PAID) they're angry at the loss of pay.

I don't blame them one bit.

I got up on time, I got to work early, I'M there & ready-to-go when I'm supposed to be, so I expect to get paid for it.

Just because their computer systems, which I'm required to use, aren't available, isn't my problem.

I'm there, I get paid.

If you refuse to pay me, then I refuse to work.

Occam's Razor.

I thought people who confuse the two would stick to writing blogs.

I must admit that I would be looking for a different job rather than working in that sort of slave shop, but I do know that a lot of people are not that lucky.

I suspect that in the UK an industrial tribunal would be involved by now. I'm glad (again) I am not a left-pondian.

devil-bill, because it should always be said

If those companies are running Active Directory to manage domains and group policies, then 15 minutes sounds about right. XP + AD takes over 5 minutes to boot where I'm currently working. On a normal day, without updates. It is a big company.

If it's really taking 15 minutes to start Vista (and not just some lawyer's mad overestimate), my money would be on the use of roaming profiles being loaded from a central server over a low-speed WAN link. Nothing to do with Vista, which should add no more than a few seconds to a boot sequence compared with XP (based on sensibly-configured. identical hardware).

As usual, just clueless BOFHs blaming the OS - either install a local domain controller or get a modern WAN link.

As pointed out above, hibernation would reduce start up time to a few seconds, but (guessing again) I expect the PCs in question are shared between multiple users (hence roaming profiles).

For those that do not believe the 15 minutes boot time, consider this. Your home PC does not have the loads of cruft that a corporate machine has. Take a bare bones Vista installation and then add: Antivirus, Firewall, Package Management software, all the taskbar applications loaded by third party drivers, plus Adobe reader and Quicktime crap in the taskbar. Plus, the time to find an Active Directory node and check & replicate policies, Now you're starting to get close.

It was bad enough with W2K and XP. Vista can only make it worse.

Of course, there is a fix is available for download at www.ubuntulinux.org.

Yeah.

There's my trousers with the 8" floppy in the front pocket.

If I want to check my University email first thing in the morning, it takes me 7 minutes from powering on a (Vista) PC at college to being able to read the contents of my inbox. It's obvious that Microsoft are aware of these slow boot times if you think about the "power off" icon on the menu, which just hibernates the PC.

As a Linux user at home, I love the way that once you are logged in the disk activity light just stops flashing, and you can get on with whatever you want straight away.

Vista has a long sloow boot up.

What is particulary annoying is the desktop is displayed relatively quickly (after a minute or so!) but doesnt respond to anything for another five minutes.

I dont normally approve of ambulance chasers but this guy seems to be doing great work on behalf of hulanity and downtrodden Hell Desk operatives.

The old BBC Micro is the way to go - flip the switch, 2 tone sound and you're up and running. Not sure about network connectivity though :(

Why do you have to wait for it to shut down? Also if you suspend rather than shutdown (a default feature) it takes 2-3 seconds to come back to life (have my HTPC set like this).

Idiots sue workplace because it employs idiots?

End of the day they're not footing the power bill, leave it on - I do at work.

And even the minimum of minimum spec machines running and MLC SSD don't take 15 minutes to boot.

Think I'd sue the IT department for having such a useless PC build image first.

Sorry, what planet are these monkeys on? I'm guessing said "call centres" are buying cheap and nasty systems, with horrendously slow hardware (and therefore not what Vista sys req's really need - it's hardly a secret it needs some good harder), and then bunging vista on them.

I don't think I could find a machine that takes that long to boot if I tried, except maybe a Dell PowerEdge Server with all boot options enabled so it sits at the BIOS for ages spinning up discs one at a time and waiting for DHCP requests for PXE boot timeouts etc. Still reckon it takes less.

Of course it probably takes 3 minutes to start, load all the spyware they've downloaded without permission, and then 12 minutes to have a quick browse on facebook, myspace, bebo, and all the other dross with a quick download of some software they want to use for "personal" reasons installed off the USB key they just happened to plug in.

Paris doesn't take that long to get started, hell no.

It's probably a lot to do with all the corporate 'bloatware' that *has* to get up and running before the user can log on.

Typical call centre attitude to timekeeping though.

I used to work for a major global temp recruitment company and we had this discussion with employers who were using just such a tactic. The "15" minutes comes from rounding up to the nearest payable unit of time.

Regardless of the OS (there were a mixture) employees were faced with hanging around waiting for the machine to boot up / boot down before they could clock in.

In the end we agreed with the employer that temps would get an extra 15 minutes a day pay on top of their "logged" hours.

I work for a large consulting company, and our laptops have a standard software image loaded on by the helpdesk. This image includes applications for many different jobroles, for example one application called the Labor Claim Tool provides reporting for consultants who work by the hour and integrates direct billing to the clients. Somebody in HR doesn't need this app, but it's loaded on by default so that everybody has a standard image which is easier to maintain.

It's reasonable to assume that every employee has at least 10-15 applications loaded by default which they are not using, and will never use due to their jobrole.

The second point is that most, if not all, of these standard "Productivity" apps run a system tray notification icon which some programmer thought must have been a good idea at the time. You know the drill, a systray icon in 4 colors which flashes all day long and occasionally pops up a bubble saying "The application xxx is successfully loaded". These icons seem to take on average about 7MB RAM (why?? What the hell are they doing with 7 million bytes of code???) and are loaded on startup.

The point is, it took my laptop, (Centrino vPro, Core Duo 2.3GHz, 4GB RAM (well, 3GB on WinXP), 160GB HDD) at least 10 minutes to start - probably closer to 15.

2 months ago I bit the bullet, wiped the disk, put my own WinXP clean install on, reinstalled the apps I needed from the corporate intranet and that was that. Boot to clean desktop (no HDD activity) in 1min 12 secs. I just tried it after reading this article. Before I loaded the apps, so a clean patched WinXP installation, it booted in less than 40 secs.

No decrease in effectiveness (if I need another app I can always install it from the corporate intranet), and a huge increase in productivity - at least 20 mins per day.

So I fully agree with this article and wish the lawsuit best of luck. Not that they'll win, of course.

PS before putting WinXP back on, I thought I'd try Vista - seeing as the laptop came with recovery disks. Booted in 1 min 45 secs (kinda OK) but then point blank refused to load any of the productivity software I need, even in WinXP compatibility mode. In our company, we estimate that approximately 40% of apps would need to be rewritten for Vista, and my anecdotal testing would seem to support this. Next year we're going over to Linux, a SUSE distribution IIRC, also with a 40% rewrite factor but then presumably we're free from the Micro$hackles.

Go because I wish Vista would.

1. 15mins to boot is a croc of shit.

2. If you are at work and waiting for your equipment to start, you are at work and therefore should be paid.

Methinks some people are exaggerating the truth in order to make this claim.

I don't see how this is the fault of the operating system, there is no way it's taking that long all the time unless the employer has installed Vista on completely inadequate hardware or installed other software that slows things down. Perhaps they have roaming profiles and all the employees have filled up their profiles with gigabytes of photos of cats or porn.

It can take quarter of an hour to log in where I work at the moment too. And that's with Win2K or WinXP, because the bottleneck isn't the desktop, it's somewhere else.

Who the hell installed their versions on Vista and what rubbish did they add into it?

On my install, I'm at the login screen within 30 seconds and have my web browser and Steam up and running 30 seconds after that?

15 minutes? Someone's taking the piss with that figure...

*looks at the ambulance chasing lawyer*

i am struggling to see why this is anything to do with microsoft. if anything vista boots faster than xp.

To true!

I use vista on a fairly modest machine and I can go from power on to desktop in a very short period of time, never actually timed it but I certainly dont have time to turn on, grab a coffee, fag and a chat with co-workers

The more likely reason for the delay would be the domain they are no doubt on. Vista doesn't seem slower than any other OS i have encountered recently, if setup by an even half-way competent admin. Roaming profiles can take the best part of forever, and some of the security policies can be time consuming.

Still don't like Vista and would rather use DOS like Sceptical Bastard!

Paris as she never wastes time!

My 3 month old vista machine takes about 10 minutes from switch on until the point it lets me do anything, which has become more noticeable since I've been doing a bit of work on a very old XP based laptop which is ready to go in the aforementioned 90 seconds

Hibernate fails to work on anybody's PC here at work, it either won't come back or doesn't even start

vista, not so much 1 step forward, 2 steps back as 5 steps backward, then keep going backward until you fall over

They should be thankful they have jobs at all! Fuckin Americans whine about EVERYTHING.

Under normal circumstances vista doesn't take ANYTHING like 15 minutes to boot. Perhaps the companies in question ought to upgrade their PCs rather than installing an OS that they can't actually run!

fuck that - BBC micros for all.... instant 32k of basic at your hands lol

yeah - surely the fast shut down (cant remember - the kind of stand-by one) takes much less time than XP.

surely its the way of working in these companies that is wrong?

You're forgetting the effect of roaming profiles and Active Directory coupled with often inadequate servers running the aforementioned services. I'm experiencing something similar at work, and I use Windows XP; we had snags with Windows Vista machines too. Fortunately, my day isn't tied to time it takes the computer to boot up.

a pretty badly configured AD infrastructure. I'm betting the Morons have either

a) ridiculously large roaming profiles or

b) badly configured DNS, more specifically some luddite adding public DNS servers to the network card settings cause they don't understand forwarders....

GRRR

someone's telling porkies here. Every Vista system I know of boots in under 2 minutes. W2K is far, far worse in this regard.

My Vista usually boots up in under one minute (sometimes even within 30 seconds) including logging in... I wonder what kind of setup and configuration they use.

I think it is rather cheap to blame Vista for this.

The bigger the company, the worse the PC...... from what I've seen!

Working on a huge contract for the Beeb outsourced to Siemens - running several programs at once 100% of the working day - what do we get? XP boxes with 512Mb of RAM.

The productivity we'd have gained from just increasing this to 2Gb would have paid for itself within a week of not waiting for the PC to complete an action, much less the many months I had to suffer that cack!

15 mins to load Vista? No surprise, with a million group policies to prepare, on an antique single core heap of scrap with 1Gb of RAM at best!

Hope they win the case - employees should be paid from when they arrive on the premises. Evil Bill... cos its his fault :-P

start running scripts and policies and updates and checkers and all the other crap IT depts force ontheir users and you are looking at silly times for boot up and shut down.

Add on the service packs and updates its longer

Now Vista has some issues but this is getting ridiculous! 15 mins boot time is not a problem of Vista and is a symptom of soemthing else wrong with the company's setup. Perhaps poor network setup as an employee's roaming profile is dragged down from some remote location over dial-up or some deranged software set to load during boot\login is dragging everything to a crawl.

Vista attracts such criticism that is often unfair. A problem exists so it must be Vista's fault because everything else loaded on that PC was crafted by the most skilled programmer and the hardware was bought directly from heaven.

I'm sure the problem didn't exist under XP or some such? Then the problem lies with the IT dept for not checking that "legacyapp.exe" was compatible with the new OS. "My ignition crank handle for my model T-Ford just doesn't work on the latest Ford Focus. These new cars are useless."

Urm, OS boot may take that long, but by the time you have logged on and got everything up and running 15 mins dosent sound too silly. My XP work PC takes about 10.

I left one job because of somthing like this. The boss expected us at the shop 20 mins early to open up, but would only pay from when the shop was open, and to spent 30 mins cleaning and shutting up, longer if there were still people in the shop at closing time as he didn't like locking the door at 5 to 5.

It was probably the length of time loading roaming profiles that ramps it right up. Probably coupled with using unsuitable machines.

I only know two people who have Vista at work. One was an upgrade and she moaned all her work now took longer.

The other was a complete new high end machine which apparently is fine (however it does nothing that a far cheaper XP machine wouldn't). The throw everything away and start again approach seems to work with Vista, unfortunately it was a government department throwing our money away and starting again.

All the real world organizations I've worked for aren't touching Vista with a barge pole. (Zero benefit to a change and much trouble)

Paris because she used to be rich enough...

Did these guys not evaluate Vista versus whatever they had before and other OSs on the market?

Sounds like they just installed vista because it was the latest thing - but not on it's own merits at all!

Take a bog-standard Vista box. Now add corporate security/audit software, network mounting scripts, and all kinds of login batch scripts. You'll end up with a PC that comes to life like a wheezing octogenarian trying to get out of a mudhole.

You could always try hibernate and pray that it works, I suppose.

What does this article have to do with Vista?

So basically the employees are pissed off that they can't now roll in at bang on 9am THEN turn on their PC, make a coffee, chat about celebraty cum factor because they are now being strictly monitored....Shame...

15 minutes is too unbelievable if they're booting off a network image. Especially if everybody starts at the same time so you get several hundred machines hitting the server at once.

Even without a network boot, they're not going to be logged as "working" until the OS has fully booted and they've logged on to the appropriate "I am working" server. Which will probably slow to a crawl at shift changes.

Never worked for an organisation with a network have you? One minute at the most? You are having a fucking laugh mate. It takes my XP machine that long to become functional *after* logging in, never mind booting up.

And 1st AC - yes, don't be surprised if your company PC has a piddlingly low amount of RAM in it. Wise up, a company won't pay for more RAM than they think their workers need (i.e. the bare minimum) and because MS tells them that you only need 256MB to run XP, that is all you'll get.

I'd suspect broken DNS if it's taking that long to log on.

It takes 10 minutes to boot Windows 2000 on the machines here - not so much the OS, I don't think (though that's a part) as what the corporate-ware does a part of every boot. You stil can't log in until it's done though (then ther eis more stuff until you can actually DO anything) I kinda dread Vista...

As regards hibernating, the laptop we have at home with Vista takes LONGER to boot from a hibernated state than from switched-off....

General concensus is:

- Employees should be paid for time spent preparing for work. Whether this is booting and logging in to your PC, putting on protective equipment, fkitchen prep in catering, or running through safety procedures at an on-site location, you are paid for your time AT work, not the work done.

- If employers are only paying for time when logged on, through technical limitations or policy, then they must make arrangements for equipment to be ready when the employee arrives. WakeUp on LAN, master switch with ACPI set to "Return to previous state" or some other facility must be made use of.

- Demanding employees to turn up to work 15 minutes early to boot a PC to allow them to be paid for the full days' work is illegal, and you should contact the Department of Labor. [N.B. American spelling for American department.]

Anyone running a large network will tell you that boot times, especially at the start of the day. Remember that your work computer more than likely has much more software on it than your home one (AV, database connections, specialist apps will all wait for logon before starting) and increases boot time HORRIBLY. In this instance, boot isn't "Until Windows Log On", it's "Until logged on, apps started, and logged into SoftPhone software THEN TIME STARTS."

My wife’s company allows people to work at home; the company just issues them a setup computer. Her computer takes well over a minute to reach the login screen, running XP SP2. Their user accounts are completely locked down and they have no access to Internet, other than the VPN that connects to the corp network. The slowness of the boot has nothing to do with the OS and everything to do the third rate IT staff they had set it up.

From all the companies in question claiming back off the employees, for all the time they spend:

Scratching their bums

Surfing the web

Drinking coffee

And in this case it seems, calling their lawyers!

You could write an OS in that, never mind boot one...

Around here, I have some of the PCs doing a scheduled boot at 8am, so that they can be "fully" running after a virus scan by the time their users come in at 9am.

Its just a matter of configuring the wake-up option in the PC bios.

Though if that's too much to expect every user to do, the authors of the time-logging program could easily put something in the boot up, that records the time the PC was booted rather than the time it arrived in windows.

A few years ago I worked as 2nd controller for a courier company in Stratford east London. The boss didn't consider you at work until you had logged in. So that was turn your computer on, let it go through the boot cycle, then connect to the server at the head office and then log onto that, a good day it would take 3-4 minutes, a bad day it could take a lot more.

I can see there point.

Maybe they ought to upgrade to Fedora Linux, the upcoming version will boot in 10 seconds

Sounds like the problem is they don't actually know what they are doing. Vista is ready for me to use in under a minute from boot.

@ those pepol who are saying that 15mins is slow

you have obviously not worked in a office even with xp windows slows down noticibley after a user has used it for 6mounths usuley starting to take 5-10 mins to login to windows and be able to work and the only way I have found to restore it's speed is reformat it. I have no exprance with vista in my office but form my home experience I can easley see it take 15mins to boot

and beofre pepol flame me I welcome any suggestions on how to speed up boot times but before you sugest it I have spend hours on google looking and as yet have found nothing that works

just how badly corporate IT departments can b*gg*r the configuration of an OS. They've probably got a couple of million lines of batch files that they run on start up, plus servers located in some remote data centre over an inadequate WAN link.

under some conditions. You have to remember that these time keeping apps are probably either set as startup, or even as the user fires up the helpdesk software. I have a decent machine at work (nothing fancy mind you) running XP, and boot doesnt take long at all.

However, after logging in all my apps that i need start to fire up (Trillian, Skype, ZoIPer), then i need to launch outlook (yawn), and maybe some other apps as well. After hitting enter to login i can go for a cigarette and be back before the hard disk stops thrashing.

Now consider in a helpdesk area where the PCs are probably quite cheap and low spec (management decision... what do they need computers for... they work on the phone... oh yes, the CRM software... about $100 per PC should do it). So after logging in, the software that logs the time could take several minutes before it fires up (and maybe second login prompt for the CRM or other software - more time gone).

I understand them very well. I used to run a call center and the users did not have great machines. Staff used to come into work 15 minutes early just to get logged in and be ready. The call center software logged their time and they generally launched this manually (although i did have it set to use AD authentication so there was no password prompt). Minimum 5 minutes from switching their PCs on and longer on the older machines.

I think someone is lying here, because Windows Vista is quicker to boot up than XP, that's for sure. It certainitely doesn't take 15 mins to boot up and shut down. Maybe 2 mins at the longest. Typical lawyers.

What hardware are they running Vista on? I tested Vista when it first came out but decided that the drivers were in no fit state so didn't deploy it at the time. I expected this though as it has always been the case with any new major MS OS release.

However, I recently bought a new laptop with Vista installed and decided to give it the benefit of the doubt before chucking XP on it. Now that the drivers have matured it runs fine as long as it is on appropriate hardware. I am used to it now and actually quite like it. The laptop isn't massively high spec although it does have 2GB of RAM. I havn't actually timed it, but it definately takes no more than a minute from startup from cold to being logged in, including the hardware boot sequence. Probably more like 40 seconds in fact.

There is no way that it's taking 15 minutes for these machines to start up.

I used to support a call centre environment, where the users were similarly monitored for timekeeping and penalised if they weren't taking calls when they should be. But they were let off if there was a technology fault (they had to back this up with an incident reference).

These people would deliberately lock their accounts out and raise a call for it, thereby buying themselves a few extra minutes first thing in the morning, or when they came back off break.

To resolve the password lockouts, we installed fingerprint readers. This worked for a few weeks, until the users realised that if you smear a little coffee or hand cream on the reader, it stops working. So they would log a call and sit back until and engineer came along with a cloth.

So forgive me if I am a little cynical about this lawsuit - it doesn't add up. And my experience of the users brings Hanlon's Razor swinging into action...

not much you can do about boot up time (other than not switching off the pc at all or hibernate as suggested already), but i fail to understand why, once people have "clocked out" in their app and started shutdown, they need to WAIT for the PC to shutdown? Why? Just go home! Weirdos.

Tux because...isnt it obvious :)

The staff get into the office at 9am, and push the "ON" button. Time to go for a smoke while the computer is booting. Down to the ground floor, outside the door, smoke a cigarette, back inside, up to the floor they work on, login. That's 15 minutes wasted, not waiting for the computer, but on a smoke break.

Same at the end of the shift. Not allowed to go home until the computer has switched off, so at 4.45pm, set the computer to shut down, and go out for a smoke. Back up to the office to make sure the computer is actually off, then leave the office at 5pm. That's another 15 minutes wasted, isn't it?

Mines the one with the fags in the pocket.

.. on Corporate networks at least. e.g. try booting up with McAfee On Load Scan enabled. Windows might start, but to fire up any app takes eons. Not to mention slow networks, broken login processes, bloated CorpWare, and a lack of Admin privileges to tweak anything.

The people who setup these networks tend to be poorly paid (since it's deemed a fairly trivial part of the IT dept), and often at the more incompetent end of the IT professional scale. Even if they were paid a lot, not many true geeks are gonna want to spend their times tuning Windows Desktop installs. Still, I'm sure a lot of companies could save a fortune just by improving this. Management is usually far too short-sighted of course.

Yes, windows CAN take a long time to boot - throw in a few corporate scripts to run that check registry settings and software installed. Add a roaming profile that copies the user's settings from a centralised location (that may or may not be in the same geographic location), then allow time for countless bits of bloatware to load. I have seen Win XP boxes take 30 minutes to boot. Add in the additional overhead of Vista and viola...

I work on a laptop, and so I close and shut it down every night, as it runs so hot I fear leaving it on would burn down the building. So I come in about 15 minutes early and boot up. 25 minutes later everything is ready to use.

Shutting down only takes about 5 minutes. Total time simply waiting for a machine: 30 minutes.

I am a contractor. If I wasn't a nice person, I'd come in exactly on the dot of my hours and daydream the full 25 minutes every morning. Ka-ching for me. But as it is, they still lose about £15 every morning for those ten minutes on their clock.

The main problem is not really windows vista...though the stupid amount of rubbish it loads is just adding to the problems. Many of the machines network boot or re-ghost themselves on boot, hibernating is not an option as many of these places 'hot desk'. Under XP this was not such a problem as it had nothing like the ridiculous footprint of vista, but I can well believe this.

Heck I wouldn't be surprised if some of these places did it over a wan from HQ to save staff (connectivity of course would come out of a different budget) .

Maybe these guys have badly managed roaming profiles as at my employers. My XP machine can take 15mins to log on on a bad day.

Bill gates, 'cos it must be his fault!? ;-)

A clean XP install might take 90 seconds, but a corporate XP install I've seen takes over 30 minutes to boot and I can't imagine Vista being any quicker.

Around the 1500ms mark?

Vista does not take 15 minutes to boot for me. It boots faster than any previous Microsoft OS other than DOS.

And who waits for their computer to shut down? Click shut down, leave. What's it going to do? Catch on fire while you're gone? Maybe this lawsuit is more about OCD than about boot times per se.

The other thing you can do is leave the thing on all night. It might not be "green" but it costs *far* less than 15 minutes of my time to leave a PC on for 24 hours.

Don't forget they were probably mis-sold too low spec machines ("Vista Capable"), on top of which you can add, I would guess, a slow anti-virus, AD-GPO policies etc, and the time for the clocking-in program itself to start.

Also the 15 mins is probably because many companies (and timesheet programs) work in units of 15 minutes for timesheets, so if you turned on the PC at 9:00, and finally got in at 9:05, you would be listed as starting at 9:15!

@Sceptical Bastard,

actually DOS would be quite adequate in hundreds of applications and environments, where the graphich bloat with bells & whistles add no value whatsoever. Of course, people who cannot read nor write need icons and mouse.

Paris, because I received an email today: "Stay with Hilton this Christmas from just £39 per room!"

Somehow I think they might need to optimise their GP and logon script a touch! :)

Little early for April Fool's isn't it?

Surely the solution is the sack the IT Manager who can't get a PC to boot in under 15 minutes - even Vista shouldn't take that long.

Or just leave them switched on between log-ons...

For all the time I've spent supporting friends, neighbours and family who are running Vista despite my advice?

Hah! Dos, loading off a floppy in 10s - you're dreaming... got those rose tinted specs on have you??

What you need is an old Acorn machine, BASIC interpriter up and running in the time it takes to say "Boooo-bip!". (Or if you had loads of extra hardware, like a Watford 256K expansion board and ADFS... "Booooooooooooooo-bip!"

Mine's the one with the wordwise EPROM in the pocket.

Why not just log out and set the machine to stand-by? Not as energy efficient, sure, but if Vista is so bad it takes 15 minutes to boot then it might be a valid option.

Or upgrade to XP.

Or really upgrade and use Linux with the software running under WINE (if it runs under WINE, of course).

Including logging into a network, applying the group policies and loading all the services including network security stuff and then finally the time keeping service? 15 minutes sounds quite possible for actually.

Company switches to Vista, employees sue company - Brilliant!

I can imagine the ill-informed decision makers when they decided to "upgrade" .

"Well it says here on the Vista website 'Work smarter, with a professional edge and get more done in the office', that's exactly what we are looking for."

"Minimum specs? To hell with that! We want to get more done in the office..."

Lol

IT? - Cause that's probably what the decision makers were thinking at the time.

1) No PC should take 15 minutes to boot & log-on, even with Vista, must be some shitty software loading on start up

2) Why hang around after you've logged off, just set the PC to shut down and piss off

In enterprise computing there are a bunch of things that go on during the boot sequence of a PC for example,

Login scripts

AV signature updates

Machine policies

services ... such as time-writing software.

To blame Vista is not necessarily the reason for the slow boot time - for example if the IT architecture makes 500 users take their AV signatures all from the same source location at the same start of shift time in the morning then yes this will flatten performance.... and that is assuming the source location is on the LAN and not over the WAN.

If the AD localisation structures are not correct this can interfere with performance too. If there are too many policies to be applied tothe local machine, then again this can impact performance. Are applications pushed from policy? If so is it everytime at logon? Is it from a local DFs, or a global DFS...? the questions and problems are numerous... how about the IP windowing settings? Are you on full or half duplex?

At the heart of this entire topic is the ability of IT architects to optimise their environments. Running Vista on a local machine is not the issue here, infact to blame Vista is to miss the point entirely.

Linking timewriting to login processes is an act of insanity or a very clever way of getting free labour from a crap infrastructure design.

I don't use Vista personally, but I have seen desktop performance slaughtered by the most simpe of errors in the enterprise space.

About time these call centres switched to solid-state Linux boxes - then they would probably be up in 15 seconds with a bit of optimisation.

Sorry, it had to be said.

PS. My XP work box takes more like 3 minutes and it's 3D CAD suited. The issue is probably network speed/availability, since our profiles are all on the server - and we all start at the same time!

They really are scraping the bottom of the barrel now.

15 mins is bull, I can get Vista Ultimate to boot and onto google through FF in 3 mins on an old P3 Thinkpad with 512mb ram.

I blame the shoddy techies not using their own images and sending kit out with supplier bloatware on there. Try it for yourself if you are unfortunate enough to get kit from Dell. 2 systems side by side, one clean install one Dell install. Boot and see how long it takes to get to google.

Mine the one with 'Clue' in the pocket

Even on some of the dodge network setup (with network desktop and all that crap) it would never take that long.

This is total rubbish - it basically boils down to a failure in the way companies record working time, not the tools of the job used in that that working time. Get a hole card punch on the wall. Write it down on a piece of paper as the employee enters. Make a mental note. Whatever...

To 1: hibernate or sleep the computers, or just sort them out a bit so they run better, or just use a faster booting OS.

To 2: Stop hanging around waiting for your comp to shut down when you aren't getting paid for it you numpties

I know Vista takes longer to boot than XP, but this sounds to me suspiciously aligned with the article from the other day about machines being labelled Vista-ready when really they were not capable of running the OS adequately. Cue many companies buying the cheapest machines available to run Vista, and mucho employee dissatisfaction. Looks like lawsuits may also head MS's way.

Devil Bill, obviously.

These will probably be machines which were at the bottom end of vista compatible, bought in bulk from the company who tried it and announced "Oh no they aren't"

Add in some overwhelming third party utilities and this was bound to happen. Now when I was at a call centre and we were logged by when we logged into the phone, I'd log into the phone and set my status to dealing with PC problems. Management didn't like me for it but I didn't really want them to.

Surely the solution is just to implement wake on lan, so the computers boot up in time for the employees to arrive - equally you could implement network shutdown, so the employee just logs off when they're done and the system will worry about shutting down later...

Employers have brought this on themselves by using a stupid system to measure when people start and stop work.

If your time doesn't start until _after_ you log in, then logically it _can't_ be your job to turn the PC on, because a prerequisite for you to start work is a log-in screen.

By the same argument, if your time stops as soon as you hit the "Shut down" button, then it's logically not your job to sit there and wait for the machine to finish shutting down.

Sure, it may be cheaper and more efficient to measure log-in / log-out times than, say, clocking in and out in the conventional manner, but the primary requirement here is not efficiency but accuracy.

I am no fan of Microsoft or Vista, but come on, this is a joke surely?

It is the company that use these systems which are at fault, not Microsoft.

Too many idiots, too few air tight Tape Safes!

Not but the time the corporate IT luvvies have got their hads on it, and it's had a year's worth of general use. My company supplied laptop takes around 10 minutes to boot! Time for a cuppa tea and a read of the news paper before I start work.

"15 minutes to boot an OS and log in as a user is bloody ridiculous!"

Every now and again one reads about scalability issues with authentication in large enterprises, where the Active Directory mammoth has to be woken from its slumber in order to recognise employee #28763 in his/her quest to log in, and this has been known (for whatever reason) to take a long time. Whether it's Vista or how the mammoth was set up is an open question, of course.

If thats really the case they should have a serious talk to their IT dept. (or rather more probable: Consider to get rid of the ton of unnecessary progs, games, images on the desktop etc. etc. Joe Officedrone tends to clutter his or her Comp with).

And besides... do people really sit around and give their PCs morale support while it shuts down? Or do they rather start the shutdown and hurry out of the office as soon as the logoff screen appears?

Thought so.

Billy the Saint, cause even M$ is vastly preferable to greedy two bit lawyers on the lookout for a crapload of easy class action bucks.

My guess is that it takes about 30 seconds to boot, then 14.5 minutes to apply group policy objects. My new-ish four-core work machine (with XP) originally went from black screen to login prompt in mere seconds. Then it was assimilated into Active Directory, and now I try to avoid switching it off.

-A.

Fifteen minutes from power on to starting work can easily happen if you have a large user profile that needs to be downloaded across a congested network from an underpowered server. Just the sort of thing that would happen when a whole load of people come on-shift at the same time.

I don't understand how this is a VISTA issue?

Surely this is just standard cheapskate company purchasing decisions. Buying underpowered PCs with too little memory. Purchases made by beancounters instead of BOFHs

The only time I saw Vista take anything like that long to start was on an Intel Celeron Laptop with 256MB RAM. Yeah - seriously. A laptop had been sold with a spec which could barely run XP, but they had piled Vista onto it (which at least needs 2GB to settle, if not 4GB).

So this is a stupid purchasing decision - and it can be solved by a discussion between the BOFH, the Beancounter and a cattle prod.

Now i'm not a vista lover - i uninstalled it from my laptop but even so, Vista business never took longer than 5 mins to load - and that was on my sony t-250 which has only 1ghz ULV processor and crappy low power disc and 533mhz RAM. To get a 15 mins they must be trying to run it on some old P3's or someting

Imagine working as a wage-slave in the good old free-market USA.

Free and easy here, totally voluntary sign-on and off system.

PS: Win-XP takes about 60-90 seconds to boot at our place.

Pirate, because the US is so cut-throat.

Lashings of overtime $$$$

Well, is it booted when the OS allows you to type or when you can actually start work? Because this is about the latter. The PC has a logging application that they have to start to be considered "working".

And if these machines are all under AD control and there's a fair chance they are, then the AD has to finish copying the profile to the machine.

That can take 15 minutes easy.

Now, would you like to try THINKING and do that again?

15 Minute boot time? have a laugh. Must be some pretty old tech for it to possibly take that long.

I've long thought that MS will be doomed once someone successfully sues them for consequential losses and/or lost productivity through security, crashes and reboots. Looks like we're one step towards it, at least...

Be in work 15 minutes before your supposed to be.

Walking in at 9am when you start at 9am is lame anyway.

And what it he talking about lost time at the end of the day? Does he sit and watch the PC to make sure its logs out?

If the company knew that part of the time they were paying him for was to "watch the computer shut down" then the would get rid of him fast.

Press shut down, go home. Thats not hard.

Anyway VISTA logs in faster than XP on my machine, its still shit, but thats a different story.

My 2-year-old-computer takes 2 minutes + login typing time to finish booting, and I've got 2 large apps and many smaller ones on auto-start. If the pay is tied to logging in, then only the time before logging in counts. My PC was bought before Vista was released. So you'd expect any computer with vista on it to be newer, and hence faster, than mine.

There's some serious fail going on somewhere.

A lot of Vista boxes take two or three minutes to boot.

Now take an underspeced ("Vista capabable") machine with 512MB Ram swapping already during startup. Put the home directory on a SMB share. Have, say, a couple hundred people switch on their boxes pretty simultanously. Network lag, server lagging, probably misconfigured anway.

I would expect something more like 5-10 minutes, but i guess the 15 minutes are pretty much the maximum time it ever took.

And why are they hanging around for it to be shut down. Click shut down & F**k off home....

Actual OS boot time is not necessarily the issue - we are talking about the time elapsed before being fully authenticated into some clocking-on system after they press power-on. In large enterprises this can be considerable if their PC is configured to run half a dozen scripts at startup etc.

This is very common, PC's in offices are very often low spec, loaded with vista by standard and then have all the office software and other useless stuff piled on top. Add to that the anti-virus and the standard poor maintenance (ie no regular defrag etc) you get a slow machine.

I had a similar thing with my work (though its not a clocking system). Work wanted to know why I leave the PC powered on when I leave work. I explained that it takes upto 20 - 30 mins every day to start up from a cold start. Get logged in, get all the applications I need for my job loaded and logged in ready to work. Now doing this every day means id be having to get to work at least 30 mins earlier (I already get to work early anyway to give me time to get settled and have a brew).

Adding this up we are talking 10 hours unpaid overtime a month just because statup times. Now some people will say the office should buy better pc's, other people say is vista and its massive bloat. Personally I think is a middle ground, though vista in the office environment is a bad idea as it doesn't give me anything extra to do my job (I still could use all the same applications on XP).

Ether way im happy because my box has been upgraded and its back on XP and I find it faster doing my day to do work. Thank god for working for a reasonable company :)

Paris well because I wanna :)

@AC: some companies have policy to force you turn off PCs when you leave. It will save the company power bill.

@AC & sceptical bastard: they are not talking about stand alone home PC. There are gozzilion of things running on company network, the normal waiting time is very long. It has less to do with the operating system however. The status of network, how the network was setup, servers and how many programs at auto start/run are the major issues. However, how OS handles those tasks does has impact. If the time tracking system only starts when user login certain specified software, you will have to understand the waiting time will have to include PC start time + network login time + all background programs startup time + time to start the "production" software.

I wouldn't say it's neccessarily vista, it took me ten minutes to log on to my work pc this morning, sometimes it's quicker, sometimes it's not, depends on the network I suppose, the real issue here is the companies policy, I clock in with a card when I arrive, so my pc can take all day to boot up as far as I care

My laptop came with Vista, just as it was released. I thought, why not give it a go?

My normal routine now is :

Turn it on, have a shower, get dressed, have breakfast, clean my teeth, sit down at my desk - and if I'm lucky - I can start to do some work.

With 3Gb of Ram but a smallish HD crammed to the gills, Hibernation isn't a great option - I also find that the system gets extra specially flakey after 5 or 6 Hibernates.

I've now reverted to putting it to Sleep for as long as I can before that also causes problems... but I don't like having the thing on consuming electricity the whole time , no matter how little that may be.

I don't know where you are, but many of the jobs I've had in the UK had clocking-in systems that were certainly NOT "totally voluntary". Nothing more irritating than having 1/10th of an hour taken off your pay.

On a 3-year old, underpowered Dell (Optiplex 745 Pentium D 2.8GHZ, 512MB RAM) that I use for a Vista Business SP1 test platform, it takes less than 40 seconds for a cold boot to put me at the desktop (unless I fumble the password), and less than 30 seconds to shutdown and power off.

This was about the minimum "Windows Vista Basic Certified" PC available at the time, so it can't even run Aero. I can't imagine how they could get much worse performance, and since most businesses don't upgrade OS except when they replace PCs I call BS on those numbers. Video, or it never happened.

Angelic Bill Gates!?! Never thought I'd have the chance to use THAT one, but this ain't his fault!

is kind of necessary if you're working in a high-privacy environment like a bank or medical scheme, etc....it might just be that it doesn't actually log you out and then your trusty employer will surely fire you if some dummy decides to play on the system as you.

I can well beleive it takes 15 minutes.

My work XP box takes anywhere between 5-10minutes to log on, and most of this is applying GPOs. With an upgrade to Vista, you have a lot more GPOs, aswell as a huge bloated monster of an OS, probably on underspecced hardware.

I tend to leave my PC on except at weekends. Just lock it, turn the monitor off, and go. This may not be an option in co's where timekeeping is linked to logon, but not turning the PC off still is.

2 points though:

1) "If your time doesn't start until _after_ you log in, then logically it _can't_ be your job to turn the PC on, because a prerequisite for you to start work is a log-in screen." Very true, but the real world doesn't work that way.

2) "And why are they hanging around for it to be shut down. Click shut down & F**k off home...." Remember these people are (a) Yanks and (b) working in a call centre. You can't expect them to be rocket scientists (In fact I would not be surprised if some of them had to take their shoes and socks off to count past 10)

I find I have to do this because various background processes that the company deem vital to have running on my machine will often hang on shutdown, leaving the machine wide open for someone else to wreak havoc using my credentials.

I use a machine at work with Win2K, a real video card and 2.5 gig. of memory. With all the scripts that have to be run, it takes about five minutes to login. The boot time isn't great, but I hate logging in, so I never log out. I just turn the screen saver on. Since I'm an administrator over my own computer I can also cut out most of the garbage that would normally run on my machine (except the virus protection). It was much worse with the 512 meg. of memory I used to have and on-board video. I'm guessing these people probably have the same setup.

As for waiting for the machines to completely log-off. We have our people do the same thing, because the machine doesn't always log-off when you push the button (XP) and everyone is responsible of someone does something in their name.

maybe you could spend the extra fifteen mintes it takes to boot up windows by reading a dictionary.

OK, but stop wasting money on PCs and local installs, get it all over Citrix or whatever you want. Thin client PCs with ROM code O/S, then you simply pull in the "screen" from the beefed up server and hey presto boot up in literally seconds with the added advantage that users, not matter what they do, cannot balls up the local desktop O/S!

My work PC is a quad core machine with 2GB RAM. On boot the only thing it starts are Microsoft Communicator and all the services that the corporate I work for requires:

- Anti Virus

- Help utility (god knows what this actually does, clicking on it doesn't offer any help)

- Marketing video player (e.g. a video on demand player that runs on boot and cannot be killed).

I've got XP still, and time from power on to login prompt is already about 2 minutes. Once I've logged in, it's about another 90 seconds before I've got my desktop visible. Starting outlook (which I tend to do first) I've timed at 4 minutes. That's 7.5 minutes to get into my email - and that's on one of the highest spec machines in the building running XP.

Considering how slow my laptop at home is to start vista (probably about 3 minutes from login to that pointless system info box appearing in the middle), adding vista into the boot sequence could easily get to 15 minutes at work.

BTW - with respect to shutting the machine down - if the company has a policy requiring the PC be switched off at the end of the night, it's possible that the staff (we're likely to be talking about poorly paid bottom of the pile staff here anyway) will get penalised some amount of salary for leaving their machine on. So you HAVE to wait for the shutdown to complete before you can go home.

I'm not agreeing that it's vista's fault - it's just a contributing factor - but the timescales and issues listed are certainly possible in a large corporate network. And I would also agree with the people posting earlier that you just get in early/leave later - it's no different to getting your first cup of coffee, or taking your coat off... And I don't expect the company to pay me for that either.

they are in a call center they probley have to w8 for the last shift to finish for the computers to be free

@all the commenttards

just because your own personal archaic PC boots Vista in well under 15 minutes doesn't mean the claim that this companies desktops do not is a lie - who knows what scripts and programs are running on startup!

I'd want to look very carefully at the management processes at these companies. Suppose the team leader calls a meeting first thing. No time to login. Do they get paid for that? The fire alarm goes off so everyone has to go outside. Paid? The time reporting server goes down. Paid? A PC crashes and has to be rebooted. Paid? I daresay they should spend a bit more time thinking how they manage their staff rather than just installing a piece of software and hoping they don't need to do anything more.

They'll all be logging on at the same time. My only experience of work PCs was in the Civil Service. Flexitime meant that booting up all the PCs was spread out.

It did take longer when everyone booted up at once, after a power cut, server crash, etc

annoyed previous comment hasnt posted but sounds like roaming profile/dns problems to me.

do said companies on the receiveing end want a troubleshooter for a ridiculous fee?

Credit Crunch? N'ah Vista's to blame again!11!11!

I also find Vista - on 1 gig - boots up in 45 seconds.

AD does not need to copy profiles unless some fuckwit has implemented roaming profiles over a WAN, in which case the person responsible is an idiot. Even if implemented, large folders (usually the IE cache) should be excluded. Workstations should also not be updating at boot; they should be configured to pick up new AV signatures at some point during the day; ditto installing updates. The implication here is that the company is too cheapskate to buy a proper AV management system, and WSUS is FREE for fuck's sake. No excuse.

If GPOs are taking too long to process then too many are being applied. Again, the people responsible need to learn how to manage an AD domain.

Old PC, XP Pro dual core 1.8Ghz laptop 1.5Gb Ram, cold boot >20 mins

New PC, Vista Business, single core 3Ghz desktop 1Gb Ram, cold boot <3 mins

Obvious differences in machines, so not such a fair comparison (cpu/hd/ram etc.), but Vista boot is much quicker (they shouldn't be ~7 times the boot time different), almost identical applications, I'd use the Vista machine over the old XP laptop any day of the week, both machines logging on to a huge corporate domain, I upgraded from XP because of the boot time.

I hate these comments that Vista "loads" quicker than XP. How? It is bigger and loads more services.

What it actually does is show you a prettier login screen faster, but the services are still loading in the background and it is still longer until you can use the damn thing. MS pulled the same stunt with XP over Win2k.

AS for 15 monutes. My 6 month old laptop running Vista Home Prem can take 15 minutes to hibernate easily. Rubbish OS.

"....greedy two bit lawyers..."

That's tautology, old son.

I am lucky where i work as they do not do this(YET)

I worked at a few companies where punching in your time would be via the ISDN phone system.

Which is equally just as bad. I still think the best way to log time is through the web browser.

By doing it though the web browser change is instant then you do not have to hang around the pc while it shuts down.

Someone needs to find this asshat in Reno and beat his ass.

Work laptop, from cold boot to login prompt: 1 minute. That's with only 2 gig of RAM.

Home gaming rig, from cold boot to login prompt: 20-30 seconds.

I think the companies are running underpowered machines, likely have a shit network and are screwing the employees. It's NOT Vista. If the machine can't run it, why the fsck is it on there?

What about the 8 hours a day the manager isn't actually managing (rather than letting the people do their work)? Is that not working too? Unless the manager is calling customers, meeting with staff, and so on, they shouldn't get paid either.

And the boss who doesn't even do THAT should give all the profit to the shareholders because he sure isn't doing CEO-renumeration-level work 8 hours a day. Five minutes, tops.

Any PC can take forever booting, evening using XP, Linux, Unix, etc. Depends on the network startup configuration, servers accessed, bandwidth, PC processor and memory, etc. Environments requiring long boot up times reflect poorly on senior management. And if you think the Board of Directors even knows how long it takes, then you are nieve.

...It's all about the corporate environment and network...

My personal tale... cue the wavy lines indicating that we're going back in time, although, not much...

---------------------------------

One time, we had an all-hands meeting scheduled for 08:00 sharp. Basically it was a "come to jesus" meeting because a milestone had been missed, bonus payments would not be forthcoming and therefore upper management need not spend lunchtime pondering the wonderful range of paint jobs that BMW offers.

We had a flexitime system back then, wherein the latest you could arrive for work was 10:00 am, so by specifying 08:00, it was made crystal clear that this was a serious event. Furthermore, we were told to bring along our current status, achievements, slippage etc. No problem - I'd collated this info into a tidy little spreadsheet the night before, all I needed to do was print it out.

I arrived at work a little later than I intended - about 07:40 - and switched on my PC.

[NB - the messages below are approximate in content and order. I was far too pissed-off to recall them exactly at a later date.]

"Applying security policy"...

"Updating system settings"...

"Checking user info"...(by now it was 07:50 and my fingernails were embedded in my palms)

Finally! A login dialog! I enter my details and hit return.

The login dialog kind of grays-out and sits there...

And still it sits there..

"Starting windows desktop"...

Sweet Jesus, a windows desktop at 07:55! But Wait - What's this?

Four dos boxes appear on the screen, all doing something or other and each sternly warning me not to touch the mouse or keyboard. Give me strength!

At 07:58 I get to interact with the required apps and fire off two copies of my status report. I got into the meeting last and at 08:01. The boss said, with not an ounce of humor, that it was good of me to turn up and is it ok if we start now? Not a good start...

Long, boring (although I was anything but bored at the time) but a real-life example of how achingly slow the corporate bootup / login process can be. If you have difficulty visualising my frustration and rage, have a look at "Office Space", specifically the part where Peter is trying to quickly shut down his machine and duck out early.

I'd never noticed or known how slow the process was before that day because I'd usually switch the machine on, then head off to the stand-alone network where the testing is carried out and get all those machines started up. By the time I'd done that and grabbed a coffee to take back to my desk the login prompt would be up and it would be a relatively short wait to get started.

To summarise: This shit really does happen.

Wouldn't it be great if IT could set up an intranet page so you could book a "wake on lan" for a set time each morning? Say, 20 minutes before you are likely to turn up...

...who said people could just leave their computers on/asleep.

Many companies have an explicit company policy which says you can't do that, 'for the environment'. (their profits more like).

...who said people could set their computers to shut down and then just p*** off.

Those self same policies also state that you can face disciplinary action if you leave your computer switched on; it matters not whether it's a failed shutdown or you meant to leave it switched on.

They WOULDN'T BE ABLE TO FILE SUIT over unpaid shutdown time if that were not the case.

...who said 'ooo, my computer starts in two minutes, 15mins is WAY too long!'

You've obviously never worked in a large corporate environment with ageing/slightly misconfigured kit. AD roaming profiles & all that crapola which goes along with it can take ages and ages to transfer, particularly if the server is overloaded and lots of people arrive/leave at the same time.

Meh

Can all the idiots trying to compare a boot time in a company to the boot time at home just shut up. I remember in the days of NT getting similar boot times where a roaming profile had to sync. Especially when an entire shift of people were all logging in at the same time and the network was getting caned. In a call centre where someone doesn't have the same desk 2 days in a row, it is highly likely that roaming profiles are in use, and combined with other standard corporate stuff (antivirus updates, database apps starting up etc.) it is no surprise that some call centres are taking 15 mins to log in.

Some offices (including where I am) have a policy that laptops must be locked away. In order to do that you need to let it finish the shutdown sequence before yanking the network and power cables. So YES they need to hang around until it's finished shutting down.

As for startup, one machine may start quickly, but when a few hundred machines start hammering the profile and AD server simultaneously the server will bog down somewhat.

I miss my Acorn A310, it was booted and ready before the monitor had warmed up.

Paris, because she's ready in no time at all.

It always amuses me when I read about management getting into troubles when they start "metricating" workers. In most cases, they think they're getting more control over their workforce, but they fail to see some of the unanticipated consequences of measurements as applied to individual productivity, etc., as is the case here. Converting workers into a numeric profile just serves to bring down morale and encourages staff to look for ways to cheat the system and find all sorts of work-to-rule and make-work type excuses for why they're not able to work at top speed. I'm not too surprised that Vista gets the shaft here, even if it's not the main culprit (although Active Directory doesn't get off so lightly).

Got to be something to do with roaming profiles, surely..

I'd agree with the poster that recommended a Citrix farm with a linux client PXE booting.

Both my laptop and desktop run Vista and they boot in under 2 minutes, if that. I can't imagine an optimized Vista system taking 20 minutes to boot or shut down. Besides that, who waits around for their PC to shut down, then claims that time as "worked time"? That's bogus. Here come the lawyers. Anything for a buck.

I'd just pull the power cable and put it back in. Instant shutdown and get to leave at contracted hours.

Well my Vista x64 install at my office takes ~20 seconds to boot to login from startup, But then the machine has 4GB or Ram and a dual core 2.2 CPU..

Oh i just rebuilt the machine and that spec only cost me £120...

Vista needs loads of RAM, once it has the RAM it runs much faster than XP, with RAM being so cheap these days £35 for 4GB so stop bitching and go shopping.

all you smart arses who said sleep the machines are the exact same people who bugger my electric bill.

If you aren't using it TURN IT OFF!

Plus if it is a call centre it is people hot swapping desks isn't it so they're latently using roaming profiles on a shit network infrastructure AT&T are bound to have bollocks IT look at their services.

I called Newnet not that long ago, took the woman 20 minutes to boot her machine and get my account details on screen. Why? Because of all the times in the world the Admin bint decided to run her Sage back up on a monday lunchtime.

nob

It just goes to show what utter shite Vista is

15 min to boot a work computer and log in is not bad at all(well in a windows network). In a corporate environment lots of things have to happen during boot time and login, connection to AD, check/install updates, policy configurations/enforcement, starting many services, starting AV services and AV server connections, update AV, copy and load roaming profiles, batch script running, and what not. These all take time

In my former company (20,000 desktop computers) we were told "Before you depart, Shut Down and Restart". That allowed the IT gremlins to access our machines at all hours of the night. But that notwithstanding, people need to both understand their role and work smarter.

I told my people their workday started at 0730 hours and they were expected to begin the login process at that time; actual work would start whenever the computer was available. At quittin' time they were to initiate the prescribed Shut Down & Restart protocol and walk out the door.

I was assured by the IT folks our data was safe and I took them at their word. In over ten years under this system we had no important lost data. All work related data was maintained on a network drive and it worked very well.

The simple fact of the matter was my folks did their work with the resources they were given and they used those resources as I prescribed. It was not my people's job to either maintain the equipment or to compensate for it. We worked within company protocols and policies and let those in charge of the hammers and nails keeps them in proper working order.

Se started explaining his new policy that we had to be logged in and ready to work at the beginning of our shift. I stood up, interrupted him and asked two questions.

1. Am I correct in me belief that securing our computers by logging in and out is an important part of our jobs here?

<His answer> An exasperated yes.

2. What does *Labour Relations think of your illegal policy?

<His answer> aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa?????

That was the last we heard of that foolishness.

* Labour Relations is the Canadian Government agency tasked with protecting employees rights.

"Vista does not take 15 minutes to boot for me. It boots faster than any previous Microsoft OS other than DOS."

What a crock.

Vista boots slower than XP, and for reference, I put a Windows 98 PC (1GHz P3, 256MB RAM) next to a new XP PC (Pentium Dual-Core 2GHz, 2GB RAM) and the Windows 98 machine was so much faster to boot, even given that the old machine has a shit old 5400 rpm clunker, and the new one has a shiny 7200rpm drive.

I work in a Linux-based shop. Home folders mounted over NFS, with login validation by NIS. Only app most users run is a web browser. We reboot the machines about once a month, due to a slight memory leak most probably in either X or Iceweasel.

I had to deal with a system like this and my machine was left on till it misbehaved and I tried to restart only after I logged in. I also made sure I only used the toilet etc after logging in and before logging out int he evening. If there was a shutdown problem I would use the off switch.

15 minutes is reasonable for all the network connection and programs that have to start before you can start

1) Why are you to think to read other peoples comments... Saying "I think they are lieing. My PC tahes 30 seconds to boot" after 3 comments saying "I have just the same problem at work" just makes you look like a fuckwit.

2) This probably has nothing to do with the speed of the network, and all to do with the amount of crap they make you load on your PC. The company I work for has a on sight servers, 100G Optic line to the backup servers, everything off the main site, and is conected to JANET (Running 2 x 40G JANET lines). It could be my crap PC or the Servers, but then Im running XP. I can bet Vista is slower, as whilst it may have a fas bootup, the server will still be the same and it will have a load more to transfer.

3) Why oh Why do people keep saying "well I just sleep my PC". Bugger all use when you have to shut your PC down at night. Seems alot of people here talk the talk but dont walk the walk. I think alot of the BSers have never worked in IT, otherwise they would realise that some backups and AV programs (less and less now) NEED the PCs to shut down at some point in the day.... Oh, and you have to wait for your PC to shut down. I have had mine hang a few times, open to anyone who comes along to roam through my PC and distroy stuff. Not good when you have access to things like the accounts programs.

1 min past the quarter = 15 mins pay, either docked for lateness or lost coz their company won't pay the overtime.

Now while i think 15 mins is a load of cobblers, i still just want to point and laugh at the poor little morons for using Vistard. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!.

Pointless post over.

Don't worry, i'm leaving now, mines the one with FreeBSD in the pocket

the 15 min sceptics have obviously never touched a PC on a large network. 15 mins from power on to desktop is about average for the Government PC's i support at the minute.

256mb RAM + XP + Novell Netware = enough time to get a coffee, breakfast and have a good dump before your PC is up and running.

My work machine is Vista Business x86, 2GB of RAM, with a Dual-core 2.4 GHz processor. I've never had to sit for more than thirty seconds from bootup to login (updates notwithstanding), and my desktop is usable within two minutes after login, and that includes auto-starting Outlook, SQL Server, and a whole plethora of other services.

As an added comparison, my machine at home (Vista Business x86, 2GB RAM, 1.5 GHz single-core) takes about two minutes to go from boot to login, and another two minutes from login to fully-usable desktop.

While I can sympathize with the long Vista startup times, I seriously doubt that is main contributor here. Like many have said, the cause is more than likely the nozzles setting up these machines that have sub-standard hardware with loads and loads of crap to run on startup which pull more crap across a poor infrastructure.

Paris, because she's always fast.

...if machines are taking this long to boot, your AD is badly configured. Roaming profiles are probably the culprit here; they're a nightmare and used far too often where redirection of desktop and documents folders would be a more appropriate solution.

It would not surprise me at all if the "up to 15 minutes" being quoted is not the actual boot time, but rather the chunk of pay that is lost while waiting for the system to boot ... even if the system "only" takes 2 minutes. Some companies pay in 15-minute increments. For example, I used to work for a company that paid like this:

Punch-in @8:45 = get paid from 8:45

Punch-in @8:46 = get paid from 9:00

Punch-in @9:01 = get paid from 9:15

One thing was for sure ... not many people punched in between 8:45 and 9:00 ... most tried to get there as close to 9:00 as they humanly could in order to avoid working for free, just like they left as close to, but not before, 5:PM for the same reason. Not much company loyalty, there, as everyone but the owners saw this trick as a way to screw them out of pay. There's no employee benefit from a setup like that ... pure profit for the owners.

Or at least those of you who've questioned why the machines have to be shut down must. If there's no other reason then it's cost - 100 or 1000 machines hibernating for sixteen hours are still going to cost a few quid by the end of the year.

But then that's not the only reason.

What about updating machines over night? If it's off, then nobody's going to be logged in are they? Or what if you used a Linux image to copy over a new image of Windows overnight or even just update a few files? Surely that would warrant a shut down?

Finally of course, there's the fact that the time-clock software wouldn't work too well if you put the machine to sleep 'cause the software would never know it had been put to sleep would it?

Employees of large corporations working for longer than they should for no pay...

What's new?

The retail sector has been screwing its employees mercilessly for donkeys' years. It routinely takes half an hour or more (unpaid time) to cash up at the end of the day and it's always unpaid.

It's just an accepted part of the job that you work off the clock (in certain sectors) but I'd love to see a class action suit (or UK equivalent etc) led by all those who've ever worked in retail (or whatnot) take those greedy fuckers employing them for all the unpaid time plus interest etc.

Yeah, let's stick it to 'em! Workers of the world you have nothing to lose other than your er, jobs, livelihoods and crap pay...? The unemployment revolution has already started. So this is the real reason Vista takes so long to boot up and close down, eh? It's all part of the same damn conspiracy I tells ya!

"If those PCs are [...] so misconfigured...."

The hell they are. The article clearly states that they run Vista. Read more carefully next time.

I find it funny how people here write "15 min, no way, my 6 month old single-user PC boots Vista in 5 minutes, and I only spent 2 weeks tweaking the install". Most corps do not give new $800+ machines to the non-managerial crowd, and they have heavily-multiuser environments (based on M$ crap). And they usually can't afford to pay a techie to spend hours of tweaking on each individual system. Simply put: Vista does not work out of the box, and is clearly not enterprise-ready. But we all knew that already.

As for the couple guys who wrote "the morons should upgrade the machines", well, some companies might be a bit reluctant about forking a few million dollars in hardware in addition to the Vista licensing extortion, just to perform the exact same work as they did before. Don't you think?

To the couple fanbuoys able to boot Vista in under 30s (Yes, I read that in this thread), I suggest you unplug the box (or remove the battery) and see how your computer likes it. 30s boot cycle with Vista? Either you have the last Cray, or you just hibernate and wake up your machine, never actually shut it down.

I think this guys watch goes about 5x faster than anyone elses 15 minutes to boot vista. They must all be working on 486's or something. You could load programs off a tape quicker than that!

Sounds like these people are scraping the bottom of the barrel.

It's vaguely stunning to watch the number of people who vociferously claim that because it's not taking that long for them, then these people must be lying.

Hey, ever heard of the concept of "different configurations"? Hardware, software, scripts, setup, all affect startup. Do you people even know how to spell I.T.?

Although technically (and reluctantly) I have to agree it's not necessarily a Vista problem, but a configuration problem, and most likely mainly a bossware problem. Unless for some reason Vista itself is causing some of those slowdowns due to the way it does things?

You dont get paid for when you get into your workplace? what the....

And what is it with most of you, so quick to bash Vista, I mean what are you expecting, a 2 second boot on a 486 with 16mb memory?

Wake up, Why should vista run faster on older hardware??? it's a NEW os, I don't go expecting Crysis Warhead to work on a Vodoo 5000 gfx card with 0.0001 meg memory do I?

Been using Vista since Longhorn, yes it's had a couple of bugs, what are you going to tell me, XP was perfect when it was released????

Stop with the shit already! and what, most of you are going to bum Windows 7 when thats out?? just because everyone guesses it's going to be "awsome" because its not called "Vista"

Bullshit, Windows 7 is build on vista with fixes/improvements, and you watch how many people say its cool!

Stop with your vista crap, if your comps can't run, it dont install it, does it really have to be more complex than that?

Gates, Because he has to put up with your shit!

we run vista on a corporate domain as well and even with many apps loading at login as well as scripts and a/v updates, it may take 3-4 mins tops to get to my desktop and the drive to stop thrashing. seriously, your dns is whacked or your vista workstations may have various crap that is not necessary.

i for one have found that TPM and various applications for accessing TPM dont work well at all for vista and should not be used unless absolutely necessary. it was the magic bullet for our current dell gear. instead we use ipsec vpn clients and all data is secured on network and doesnt leave on laptops, which has the added benefit of being properly and frequently backed up. now our workstations run smoothly.

the moral is to learn to tune your workstations, this goes for any version of windows. turn off unwanted services, make sure your services dependencies are in order so that your timecard services start right after network services. otherwise you have other network issues to look into. learn group policies and ou planning to start with and your shit will boot and login like a champ, mine does...

ps: i cant believe this is even for real. those network admins need to be replaced.

No, you don't spend hours tweaking every box. You tweak one (spending as long as it takes) and then deploy the tweaked build to all the others. No-one in a corporate environment uses a box straight out of its box, as it were.

Unless he's a berk.

"with RAM being so cheap these days £35 for 4GB so stop bitching and go shopping"

Hmm, let us take a small corparate environment with, say, approx 1000 machines.

So £35x1000=£35k, which is probably about 3 peoples salaries in a call centre, or at least 2.

OK I know there are other things to consider here, like volume discounts, but people have to remember WE ARE TALKING ABOUT A CORPORATE ENVIRONMENT NOT YOUR HOME GAMING RIG!!!

"Stop with your vista crap, if your comps can't run, it dont install it, does it really have to be more complex than that?"

I've forwarded your message to our finance and it directors so they can stop buying new computers to run Vista on. New meaning "built with Vista as the target OS" and it runs like a dog.

It's not complex to expect a new computer to run Vista is it?

It's overblown with a flashy UI that's inconsistent and unhelpful.

XP wasn't perfect when it was released but the overall design philosophy behind it wasn't as just plain wrong as the one behind vista, so it started off in a better place.

"Bullshit, Windows 7 is build on vista with fixes/improvements, and you watch how many people say its cool!"

Let's just look at a few things people have thought were cool over the years

steps

spice girls

flared trousers

The Mullet

People say lots of things are cool, that's not really a great indication of what is actually good, more an indication of the stupidity of humans.

I've seen W7 and it's vista with bigger taskbar buttons...wow, I truly feel blessed to know this is the future.

If your work only started when MS Office 2007 had started with a blank document with the corporate styles loaded and ready, would your boot times be 3-4 mins?

No because the boot up time includes the time until you can start work. And if you can't start work because the autorunning MS Office is still loading, you're still bootstrapping the working computer.

Now what if it was a web app? 100+ web apps all starting at the same time.

PS: as one person has said, if you aren't at work and working, how can you turn the work computer on? Are members of the public allowed to turn their IT equipment on, because that's all their employees are until they start work: the public.

Who are all these idiots saying that people should turn up to work before their start time? What the FUCK? Why on earth should people give up their own free time, without compensation, just because the employer's policies make them waste the first few minutes after they get there?

Will he sue the government if he gets stuck in traffic too?

More frivilous law-suits its a wonder there is any money left in America, oh wait, there isnt.

I am an experienced Windows user, from v3.1, DOS, in my early childhood, to the Vista on a 2.4 ghz laptop I have today.

Vista has caused me to lose time, lose jobs, fail interviews, fuck up deadlines, and for what? For the reason that XP is STILL 180 quid to buy despite the fact that it's a 'defunct' OS.

I'll be controversial here - I LIKE XP. It worked.

Vista doesn't work at all. Windows Explorer (the browser and the shell) crashes at the merest search, copy, delete function request. It is the biggest mistake Microsoft have made in years.

Not to mention the fact that it is a perfect environment for rootkits, despite four years of R&D to prevent exactly that.

The retail sector has been screwing its employees mercilessly for donkeys' years. It routinely takes half an hour or more (unpaid time) to cash up at the end of the day and it's always unpaid.

That's a big no no in the US. that will get you fined.

This is a long standing issue that doesnt just effect windows vista.

For a long time now, UK companies have had the "Time Vs. Security" issue highlighted and put in check y various unions.

The Communication Workers Union sorted this issue out quite some time ago.

When will other companies realise that you can not update systems or security or anything that effects user logon and expect the user (employee) to foot the bill in personal time.

Logging on, whether it be secure or not, is a process that the company should take responsibilty for. If the company does not it opens up the realm of "Time no longer Vs. Security"

A company could have a logon system that could take 15 minutes to get into and expect the employee to arrive 15 minutes early for their shift - or not pay them for the 15 minutes at the beginning of their shift. This is not acceptable under any circumstance.

This is kind of old news, highlighted by another Microsoft release of a system that takes even longer to start than their previous versions. Wasn't Vista suposed to be faster and better?

Given everything you said, I have no doubt that you are an 'experience' windows USER. You are certainly not an administrator as bullshit you just spouted certainly has nothing to do with Vista. Is vista also responsible for climate change, the oil running out and WWII?

fuck that, id be yanking the power cord and walking out.

Well, actually it is. If it wasnt for all the power required to run Vista climate change would not be happening so quick. The oil running out is a byproduct of all the machines getting scrapped to make way for the latest greatest ubermachines to run the dog. And yes, WWII was caused by Vista. It was merely a practice run of world domination.

>> ..who said people could set their computers to shut down and then just p*** off.

> Those self same policies also state that you can face disciplinary action if you leave your computer switched on; it matters not whether it's a failed shutdown or you meant to leave it switched on.

In which case company policy requires you to stay and make sure the PC shuts down.

In which case it's part of your job.

In which case you should get paid for the time involved.

Q.E.D.