Computer powers on when you enter the room, and has finished booting when you're seated.

lol, how big is your room? Windows ME would take an AGE to boot, there's no way it would be up and logged in by the time i sat down unless i have the motion sensor at the end of the driveway...

lol, how big is your room? Windows ME would take an AGE to boot, there's no way it would be up and logged in by the time i sat down unless i have the motion sensor at the end of the driveway...

Well, dunno about Windows ME, never had that one. But that thing worked very well with XP (which took around 25-26 seconds to boot, POST excluded) and with Windows 7, which, funnily, takes almost exactly 7 seconds (POST included). It would probably boot faster if it didn't have to mount an iSCSI volume and two SMB shares, too. Either way, 7 seconds is mighty fine for me, nothing faster is needed. It's not like I'm running towards the PC as if I was trying to save a baby from a burning house or was trying to beat the world record. By the time I've walked in, put down my coffee mug, and sat down, it's all ready to go. Which is just fine.

No, unluckily Windows 8.1 isn't taking 8.1 seconds to boot (it does when it's doing that cheating fake boot, but it takes well over half a minute on a "real" boot, and up to an hour after installing an update, meh). Then again, I only have Win8 on my convertible, which is "always on" except for the odd cases when it powers off for no apparent reason (such as when logged out, running on AC power and battery charge reaching 100%, there's a ~5% chance it will be turned off when you next open the lid, don't ask me how this works).

I used to do the always-leave-on thing on NT4, but this was kind of different (Seeing how my assistant would be puzzled to find both the PC and lights turned off in the morning, which nobody did since the government paid all bills, electricity included. It was enough of a challenge explaining to her why one might nevertheless turn off the lights when nobody was going to be in the office for the next 10 hours. Like, environment, and stuff.)

Biggest problem I have when installing Windows is the utter paranoia that I'm about to nuke the wrong drive when installing... fortunately smaller SSDs have made that slightly less likely to happen... but damn if I don't check that size and ID multiple times before pushing the button...

Quoted for truth. I write down the sizes of each partition in bytes, megabytes, and gigabytes, and if any of them are even remotely close to the one I want to overwrite I start deleting like crazy from the one I want to overwrite.

Computer powers on when you enter the room, and has finished booting when you're seated.

I need it. Currently I walk in, start the computer first, and then put down my computer bag, take off my headphones, take off my company badge, and put away the bottled water.

By then Windows 7 has booted, but then I need to open Chrome and all of its 10,000 tabs need to load.

Then use the bathroom, check my weight, do 2.5 push-ups, and finally ready to go.

L. Spiro