Question Laptops and "all day" battery life

[Chz]

I have no idea if I have been using this on Win 10 and 11 laptops I've used over the last few years.
I assume it's on by default.
How much quicker is it?
And would it feel like the 1980s again if we switched it off? How significant is it to boot times? Roughly. Any ideas?
Do I need to blow the dust off my autoexec.bat notes?

Fastboot on something modern (laptop-wise) is near to "open it and it's ready". Regular boot is still pretty quick on a modern system, but you will actually notice it booting up. You're looking at a second or two vs. 10 seconds.

It's a bit different on desktops because the POST process takes longer than the actual boot most of the time. The price you pay for being able to hang any random piece of hardware off it and expecting it to work. (my system registers a POST time of ~14 seconds)

 

[Throbbing Angel]

Fastboot on something modern (laptop-wise) is near to "open it and it's ready". Regular boot is still pretty quick on a modern system, but you will actually notice it booting up. You're looking at a second or two vs. 10 seconds.

It's a bit different on desktops because the POST process takes longer than the actual boot most of the time. The price you pay for being able to hang any random piece of hardware off it and expecting it to work. (my system registers a POST time of ~14 seconds)

So laptops don't POST?

 

[Chz]

So laptops don't POST?

They absolutely do, but as a laptop will only have one of half a dozen possible configurations it doesn't need to run a scan of everything at boot time. It just keeps a known good configuration and a checksum. If the checksum varies, it will tell you to boot into the BIOS to alter hardware. Why this isn't an option for desktops, I don't know... With a desktop, you can fuck about with it at your leisure and expect it to boot to Windows first time without arguing with you.

Edit: Example. Every laptop I've used, if you add RAM you'll get a "RAM size mismatch, press F2 to enter BIOS". If I add RAM to my desktop, it just boots with more RAM. That's why laptops boot so fast.

 

[UnderOpenSky]

Fastboot on something modern (laptop-wise) is near to "open it and it's ready". Regular boot is still pretty quick on a modern system, but you will actually notice it booting up. You're looking at a second or two vs. 10 seconds.

It's a bit different on desktops because the POST process takes longer than the actual boot most of the time. The price you pay for being able to hang any random piece of hardware off it and expecting it to work. (my system registers a POST time of ~14 seconds)

Never noticed that, thanks.

My work laptop is 10.2 and gaming PC is 10.4. I use fast startup though.

 

[Chz]

That's fucking fast for a desktop! I think the recent ones are certainly worse than they used to be. DDR5 is a bit... fussier, and also I have a fair number of disks and peripherals for it to enumerate.

I'd say... Laptop POST is about 2 seconds, another 5 at most to boot. Desktop POST is about 15 seconds, but then the boot time is about 3 seconds. (fastboot on). The desktop is quite a lot more powerful, of course, so the boot time once it POSTs is minimal.

 

[UnderOpenSky]

That's fucking fast for a desktop! I think the recent ones are certainly worse than they used to be. DDR5 is a bit... fussier, and also I have a fair number of disks and peripherals for it to enumerate.

I'd say... Laptop POST is about 2 seconds, another 5 at most to boot. Desktop POST is about 15 seconds, but then the boot time is about 3 seconds. (fastboot on). The desktop is quite a lot more powerful, of course, so the boot time once it POSTs is minimal.

It's a far cry from turning the PC on and wondering off. Then opening all the programs you'd need for the day and wondering off again.

My desktop is quite simple, just a few NVMe drives, 2 sticks of DDR4 and a GPU really. Is the amount of peripherals. I'm on a remote session to an old Dell i3-4150 with 4GB and it's only 11.8? (of course logging into windows is not quickly.

 

[Chz]

It's a far cry from turning the PC on and wondering off. Then opening all the programs you'd need for the day and wondering off again.

My desktop is quite simple, just a few NVMe drives, 2 sticks of DDR4 and a GPU really. Is the amount of peripherals. I'm on a remote session to an old Dell i3-4150 with 4GB and it's only 11.8? (of course logging into windows is not quickly.

Oh yes, I suppose it's worth throwing in that the Windows login is basically instantaneous.

On a full, non-fast reboot the POST time is something like 35 seconds, most of which is RAM "training" (not entirely sure what it's doing, but I'm told it's that). It needs to check that 32GB of RAM will run at 6GHz with the timings specified. AIUI, if you run it down at the minimum speed (4.2GHz) it will go through it much more quickly. Faster the RAM, more time spent "training". DDR5 is pricey, but it's more than just faster. The data lines are split in half so it's 2x32bit at a time instead of 1x64 (this has benefits with some memory calls) and there's ECC built into the chips themselves. There's still EEC DDR5, because it need to cover the data path from the chip to the CPU but it's still considerably more resilient than anything older.

 

[UnderOpenSky]

Oh yes, I suppose it's worth throwing in that the Windows login is basically instantaneous.

On a full, non-fast reboot the POST time is something like 35 seconds, most of which is RAM "training" (not entirely sure what it's doing, but I'm told it's that). It needs to check that 32GB of RAM will run at 6GHz with the timings specified. AIUI, if you run it down at the minimum speed (4.2GHz) it will go through it much more quickly. Faster the RAM, more time spent "training". DDR5 is pricey, but it's more than just faster. The data lines are split in half so it's 2x32bit at a time instead of 1x64 (this has benefits with some memory calls) and there's ECC built into the chips themselves. There's still EEC DDR5, because it need to cover the data path from the chip to the CPU but it's still considerably more resilient than anything older.

This is also cool. I didn't know that "standard" DDR5 had an element of EEC on it. But still had an even number of chips. Be a few years before I'll do an upgrade that needs it I hope.

 

[Ted Striker]

Yes, forgot to add, I have just tried that. Turned off fast-boot, Shut it down, and took it off charge at 9am this morning

99% Battery after 48 hours, motherstickers! I think I've found and fixed the culprit Can't say booting took more than 45-90 seconds (I wasn't timing)