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I've been getting a number of inquiries about the speed of Windows 7 startup and shutdown, and I've been seeing remarks that it is slower at startup than other versions of Windows. If the latter is true, then the difference isn't much; but, in any case, I decided to do some tests instead of rely on subjective impression.

My test machine is my normal personal laptop. It's a standard Pavilion dv7 running a Centrino2, with 6 GB of RAM. It originally had Vista Home Premium (64-bit) on it, and I upgraded this to Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit). Here is what I measured:

STARTUP
From power button to login screen: 62 seconds. After login: 33 seconds to full ready. Total (not counting time need for my login intervention): 95 seconds. - This is almost half a minute faster than Vista on the same box.

To spice the remaining tests a bit, I logged onto the office wireless network, opened Outlook (one IMAP email account) and a browser (Maxthon with 6 tabs open), and launched a 29 MB PowerPoint I've been editing. The remaining tests were done with these opened.

SLEEP
Sleep was measured to the point the fan stopped and the keyboard lights went out. Waking was measured to full readiness.
Time to sleep: 11 seconds
Time to wake: 3 seconds

HIBERNATE
I expected hibernate to be slow since it's writing 6 GB of RAM. (Actually, the hiberfil is only 4.47 GB.) But I was pleasantly surprised. Hibernate was measured to full power-off, and restore to full readiness.
Time to hibernate: 26 seconds
Time to restore: 29 seconds

SHUTDOWN
After running those tests, a full shutdown took 18 seconds.


COMPARISON WITH LESS RAM
How much difference did that 6 GB of RAM make? Well, I have an almost identical dv7 (a few months older) that originally had Vista Home Basic (now upgraded to Win7 Universal). It has a much smaller hard drive and only 4 GB of RAM. I repeated the above tests.

STARTUP
From power button to login screen: 43 seconds. After login: 9 seconds to full ready. Total (not counting time need for my login intervention): 52 seconds.
This is much faster than the machine with more RAM, and most of the front-end difference appears to be that it has to check less RAM in the POST. But even the after-login time was much shorter. With a little experimentation, I found the difference: On this machine, I've restored the gadgets to the Vista-style Sidebar, but haven't yet hacked that on the first laptop above. (Switching back to the Win7 implementation increased the post-login startup tiume.)

As before, I logged onto the office wireless network, opened Outlook (one IMAP email account) and a browser (Maxthon with 6 tabs open), and launched a 29 MB PowerPoint I've been editing. The remaining tests were done with these opened.

SLEEP
Time to sleep: 17 seconds
Time to wake: 4 seconds
Slightly slower... but not enough that I'd notice it in normal circumstances.

HIBERNATE
Time to hibernate: 27 seconds
Time to restore: 30 seconds
Almost exactly the same time (about a second slower in each case), despite the RAM difference. Hiberfil size wasw 2.97 GB.

SHUTDOWN
After running those tests, a full shutdown took 18 seconds.

Very interesting, thanks for that Jim although for me it is not something that bothers me.

My husband switches the computers on here, both desktops, when first getting up in the morning then leaves them to get on with it

One is an XP Home SP3 machine and mine is a dual boot Vista SP2/Windows 7 Home Premium all 32 bit so of course one has an extra 30 secs wait if the OS isn't selected on boot, which it usually isn't so then it goes into Windows 7 by default.
The same at shutdown when we've finished with them for the day they're just told to shutdown and left to it then switched off at the electrical outlet before retiring for the night.

We don't use Sleep or Hibernation but have the Screen Saver set to show all our photo's randomly, we can spend hours sitting watching them go by and being reminded of different times and places

Anyway sorry for my ramble but that's my setup but thanks for an interesting and very informative post

I've done a similar test with my Dell Inspiron 1721 laptop for both Vista and Win 7. I no longer have the actual results but for me all of those measurements were fairly similar on the same machine. There's wasn't enough difference to say conclusively that either OS is faster or slower. So for me, Vista and Win 7 are about the same in terms of speed on the same machine.

I can vouch that W7 loads and shuts down noticeably faster than Vista, perhaps 30 seconds both ways.
Also, the Sleep to awake speed is very fast, well worth using that feature now.


Kerry

Thread locked. If you need assistance with Win7 startup and/or shutdown issues, please begin a new thread. Thanks.