Technology Lab / Information Technology

Puny humans too slow for Windows 8’s high-speed booting

Now you'll choose to enter the Windows boot menu before you reboot, not after.

The boot options menu on a UEFI-based PC

Combine Windows 8 with a fast SSD and a UEFI motherboard and you have a system that could POST in two seconds and boot in seven. That's fantastic until you want to go into Windows' boot menu to fix a problem, or tell the firmware to boot off the USB key you just plugged in. The fast booting means that you have just a few hundred milliseconds to press space or F8 for the Windows boot menu—or F1, F2, F12, delete, or whatever your motherboard vendor picked this week to get into its boot device menu.

Fast-booting UEFI systems are still a rarity today (though slow-booting UEFI systems have become commonplace), but they're expected to be abundant once Windows 8 ships. Also abundant will be systems that make it impossible to hit the keyboard keys fast enough, because they won't have any keyboard keys at all; they'll be tablets. To address both of these problems, Microsoft has changed the way the boot menu works in Windows 8, as detailed in the company's latest Windows 8 blog post.

Windows 8 will do two things to help out. If you know that you want to use the menu before you even shut down (for example, to tell the system to boot off a USB key or optical media), you'll be able to elect to do so before you reboot. There will be three different ways to do this: the Settings applet has a button to reboot into the menu, you can hold down shift when rebooting from the regular shutdown menu, and there's a new option for the shutdown.exe command-line program.

Secondly, Windows 8 will be smarter about going into the menu automatically when things go wrong. Windows will already show the boot menu under certain circumstances, such as if it doesn't shut down cleanly. However, that's not perfect; Windows doesn't always know when things aren't working properly, even if it's obvious to the person sitting at the keyboard. An example Microsoft gives of such an issue is a driver problem causing the login screen to be blank; as far as the operating system is concerned, it's booted successfully and is waiting for a user to log in. It's just unusable to any human being.

Windows 8 will be better at detecting these problem scenarios, and will show the boot menu when they occur.

As for the boot menu itself, it's a new, graphical, touch-friendly affair. The menu will be substantially the same across BIOS and UEFI systems, though some options—in particular, the ability to choose to boot off alternative media—will only be available on UEFI machines.

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