Booting Windows in 10 Seconds Flat

At last week’s Intel Developer Forum, a company called Phoenix debuted new BIOS technology that allows Windows 7 to boot up from black screen to desktop in only 10 seconds. Called "Instant Boot BIOS," the Phoenix BIOS uses new UEFI technology to power on several system devices at once instead of one-by-one. It also runs only those processes that are necessary to hand control over from BIOS to OS.

According to Laptop, the company demoed the boot up process at the conference where they showed a 20-second boot on a retrofitted Dell Adamo as well as a 10-second boot on a Lenovo T400 with an SSD drive. The company’s Chief Scientist Steve Jones also produced a report from performance logging tool Microsoft Velocity that showed how the BIOS only took 1.37 seconds to hand over control to the OS. He said that future optimizations on netbooks could even lower that time.

Phoenix is currently offering the Instant Boot technology to its partners, but they are not revealing who has signed on to use the technology just yet.