[antiRepublicrat]

Given human limitation, wheel-reinvention is inevtiable. Ever wonder why an activity as simple as booting (i.e. simply moving data from disk to RAM and then calling an entry point) takes over a minute from power-on to desktop/drive not spinning?

I thought about that once. Given my processor, I should have been able to process over 60 billion commands and read over 1.8 GB from my hard drive in the optimum theoretical 30 second XP startup time. My entire OS install plus the programs that run at startup aren't anywhere close to 1.8 GB.

[ShadowAce]

Ever wonder why an activity as simple as booting (i.e. simply moving data from disk to RAM and then calling an entry point) takes over a minute from power-on to desktop/drive not spinning?

A large portion of that time is redundant. The BIOS discovers your hardware and creates hooks for it. Once it hands off operations to the OS, the OS then repeats the process again, sometimes actually using the BIOS values to confirm it's own findings.

Given that most OSes today perform their own hardware discovery, BIOS POST operations should be cut drastically, if not eliminated altogether. There are several projects currently in development that will do this. Some full-featured OS setups have been timed to boot in under 30 secs with these new BIOSes.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

Given my processor, I should have been able to process over 60 billion commands and read over 1.8 GB from my hard drive in the optimum theoretical 30 second XP startup time. My entire OS install plus the programs that run at startup aren't anywhere close to 1.8 GB.

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With all due respect, have you considered the possibility that certain instructions execute more than once - put another way, loops?

I had a CS professor make the claim that merely dragging a scroll bar in MS WORD resulted in something like 750K machine level instructions. I have no idea if that is a verifiable fact but I think the idea that things that seems simple to humans involve a LOT of machine instructions is an idea that I'm comfortable with.