Windows identity crisis

Let's see if this seems odd to anyone else...

Yep.

http://www.askvg.com/fix-windows-7-boot-screen-changed-to-vista-styled/

Yeah. Windows booted in 35 seconds.

Aha, thanks. No idea what caused it for me, I only recently noticed it changed at home, though I tend not to watch my boot sequence all that often. Figured my OS was having some sort of bad flashback..


Heh, should have mentioned the video was edited to cut down on some of the delay. :-)

It would be nice if Apple would move to UEFI 2.0, so I could just use the Windows EFI bootloader instead of waiting for my machine to kick in all the backwards compatibility features. Still haven't managed to get my BluRay drive to show up in Windows 7, due to it not seeing the AHCI only 5th and 6th SATA ports.

Hrm, neither of those fixes changed anything. Looks like locale was set properly already.

Oh well, guess I'll just call my Windows install "Vista7" now. Some other searches turn up people seeing it on really low resolution screens, or ones with low video memory. Neither is the case here, but maybe the new monitor caused the change somehow.

Maybe your high-res screen has made your video card have relatively low video memory, possibly due to the boot sequence not being able to address all the memory that's actually on there? This is just a guess.

Actually, on my netbook, Windows 7 does boot (all the way to the desktop) in ~40 seconds. I do have an SSD in there, though...

Yeah, Windows 7 can boot somewhat quickly if given the right environment. It's around 20 seconds in an ESXi VM at work where it has very little to wait on, and still catches me off guard to how fast it is.

I did find the recent article about UEFI from the BBC amusing. They act as if UEFI is some new magic bullet, when in reality it's been around for ages. PC vendors have just been slow to adopt it. What seems to be driving it now is the push to break the 2TB storage limit of MBR. Seagate has 3TB drives ready, but they won't work unless a system can boot off a GUID partitioned disk. Anyhow, it will be nice to see UEFI boot systems subtract a bit more time off the boot sequence.

As does Western Digital, but so far only on external USB.

Hmm...
I'll have to watch the video again tonight after observing my Q1-U booting up (win7). So far as I can recall, that looks like what I remember it doing.
Screen is 1024x768 presently.

It's hard to blame PC vendors, considering that (x86) Windows wouldn't boot from EFI until 2008, and, even then, only with 64-bit CPUs. There is admittedly a little bit of a chicken-and-egg problem there, but Microsoft already had EFI code, since it booted Windows from EFI on Itanium, and PC vendors would have had to develop both an EFI firmware and a BIOS shim for it, to gain virtually no benefit.

Before my SSD ate itself, my desktop was going from post-post to login screen in like 20 secs, then about 12 secs after entering the password to full desktop ready to go. It was glorious.

For some reason my BIOS loves to post twice and has done that ever since I've had it.

Thats the frustrating part. The PC vendors were waiting on OS support, and due to the delays with Vista, it kept pushing the adoption out farther and farther. And now due to their hesitation, hard drive vendors can't sell their newest drives on the open market due to a very small UEFI install base. A PC from 2007 is perfectly capable of running Windows 7, but it's can't run a new 3TB hard drive as a boot device.

At work, it seems any of Dell's systems that come with the 5500 series Xeons can use UEFI. I'm curious to try booting Windows 7 on one to see how much of a difference it actually makes.

Hm. I've got some Dell Xeon servers coming in very soon. I might play with that for a few minutes.

Edit: Except the ones I'm getting in are 5600 series. Do you have a pointer to documentation about Dell UEFI support?

No good links to docs, but pretty much just go into the BIOS setup (F2) and look for Boot Mode. Should allow a toggle between UEFI and BIOS.

Oh, okay.