Windows 7: The Man Behind Windows 7’s Fast Start

Feature Story
The Man Behind Windows 7’s Fast Start

Aaron Dietrich's job was far from glamorous: making Windows 7 start faster than its predecessor. He was floored when reviews touted the new operating system’s start-up speed.

Editor's note: This is the fifth story in "Seven Behind Windows 7," a series featuring employees who helped build the new operating system.

REDMOND, Wash. – Jan. 25, 2010 – Months before Windows 7 launched, Aaron Dietrich's boss forwarded him an early product review from CNET, an online technology news site. Until then, Dietrich hadn't heard an outsider's take on the new operating system. When he read the article, he found a prominent—and glowing—mention of lightning-fast start-up times.

"It gave me a really good feeling," Dietrich says. "I thought, 'Wow, it's not just that we're on the right path, but we're really making a change in perception for reviewers and the general public here.'"

As senior development lead on the Windows Client Performance team, Dietrich had toiled to make sure Windows 7-based PCs would fire up like rockets. But he was surprised again and again when praise for the faster start-up performance popped up repeatedly in the press and in the blogosphere.

"It's not a fancy new UI feature," he said. "It's not that thing in your face all the time like a desktop feature or window switcher or something like that." Still, he took pride in the kudos that Windows 7 was receiving.

The News Center: How did you increase start-up performance in Windows 7?
Dietrich:

There were a couple of key features that allowed us to get better boot times. The first was we introduced what we call the fast boot feature, which allows some parts of boot to happen in the background while Windows is discovering and initializing devices. That helped us gain up to 25 percent of our boot time over Windows Vista, depending on the hardware.

The other big one was that we significantly reduced the size of the operating system required to be read from disk in order to boot. Whereas Windows Vista required somewhere on the order of 220 to 240 megabytes of operating system code to boot, Windows 7 requires anywhere from 140 to 180 megabytes, depending on the configuration of the system.

That annoyed me with XP as well since both were in need of the improvements seen in 7! The one thing that really stands out the most in the interview there is about the new faster startup and how that came about.

One thing also (and probably in the article) was the enhancement regarding removing the Vista orb at launch...

...and the bootup sound. That took a couple of seconds itself and was redundant