Re: memory reading and writing

From: f0dder (f0dder_spicedham_at_flork.dk)
Date: 07/19/04 

Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 17:53:01 +0200

Beth wrote:
>
> And, I may be wrong here as I'm just going by
> "observation"...but I've noticed that XP boots slower when it
> wasn't shutdown properly or when you make a big settings
> change...some process starts up that's actually quite lengthy in
> the background...now, part of that might be a touch of
> "invisible NTFS recovery" stuff, granted...
>
Might have to do with "restore points"? XP also does a boot-time
defrag of system files (by default once a week I think). Oh, and
then there's the monitoring of the load pattern of programs, the
collection of so-called "prefetch" data, so XP can speed up the
loading-time in the future, by not strictly doing the on-demand
loading (64kb chunks), but loading in what the application needs.

Pretty nice tricks actually, and system restore points are pretty
good for end-users. I tend to turn it off, though - if anything
breaks badly enough on my system to need a restore point, it's so
broken a restore point wouldn't help :)

Not too keen about Windows File Protection though. I can see how
it's good for end-users etc, but it's pretty annoying you can't
turn it off permanently without hexediting DLL files.

XP as well as 2k support hibernation, but it has to be turned on
manually. Pretty good idea anyway, I think booting speed would
actually be a lot slower on my system (loading in a 1gig image...),
and shutdown is certainly a lot slower. A lot of laptops with OEM
preinstalled windows tend to enable hibernation.

> Again, if Microsoft ain't doing it, then perhaps they ought to
> consider it...couple this with the idea of "interleaving" the
> CPU-based parts with the I/O-based loading parts (as the disk
> I/O loading the next driver or whatever can be done _in
> parallel_ to the CPU initialising the current driver or service
> or whatever :)...
>
I think that's one of the things they actually spent a lot of time
on for XP - it's not all smoke and mirrors :)