Nov 17, 2006 at 1:57 PM
NOTE: You can still activate the /noguiboot in Boot.ini file and see the aurora bootscreen!During the Windows Vista beta, testers often complained that Microsoft was purposefully not revealing the "real" Windows Vista boot screen and was instead taunting them with a plain boot screen that displayed only a simple progress bar and a copyright message (Figure). Well, here's the real surprise: That Spartan boot screen is in fact the final boot screen and it looks like that by design. Here's the story.
Over the past few years, an alarming number of companies have released products that slow down the Windows boot process. BIOS makers, PC makers, and video card makers are among the companies that have begun adding superfluous advertisement screens at system boot, trumpeting their products, curiously, to the people who had already bought them. Working with the industry, Microsoft asked these companies to cut down on their pre-boot screens. And to do its part, Microsoft has created this simple new boot screen for Windows Vista.
Microsoft tells me that the new boot screen reduces Vista's boot time by an average of 6 seconds compared to the graphical screen they were originally planning to use. 6 seconds may not sound like a lot of time, but in the context of a PC booting, it's the difference between a near-appliance and an aging 286 that last wheezed its way along with Windows 3.1.
As a result, Windows Vista should boot much more quickly on the same hardware than does Windows XP. And in my own experience this is quite definitely the case. (There are other Vista technologies that help this system boot more quickly as well, of course.)
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