While at PhotoCamp, Kevin was kind enough to let me see his Cr-48, which is a Linux laptop from Google which relies on The Cloud™ to do its magic.
For some reason, one of the features he showed off was the ability to boot up really quickly. In fact, he counted while he booted up. I wasn’t too impressed.
Actually, I think my comments were along the lines of “Yeah, it takes my MacBook longer to boot up, and boy, that sure annoys me every 4 to 6 weeks…”
Honestly, I rarely shut down my MacBook, and instead just put it to sleep. Waking up from sleep takes a few seconds at most. Still… I thought I should test things by shutting down and booting it up again. To get to the login screen from a cold boot took about 1 minute. Logging in took about 1 minute. Launching Firefox (and loading 4 tabs) took less than a minute. So in total, it was probably under 3 minutes to boot up.
Believe me, I know boot time is important. The RED ONE boots fairly slowly. in fact it’s been said that when booting up the RED, it’s the longest 90 seconds of your life.
Besides all that, the Cr-48 looks like a fairly nice little laptop, despite the fact that it’s all hobbled in what it can actually do in the world of media creation and hacking…
5 replies on “This one boots to eleven…”
iPad is instant on, well unless you start from it off, which is rare.
If you have a Mac with an SSD they boot super fast. I think the newest MacBooks and iMacs have a special SSD that makes boot time even faster. Can’t speak for Windows or Linux with SSDs.
Oh yeah, iPad is instant on. It’s also not a laptop, so I expect it to be different. SSDs are definitely fast. It’s all good. Instant on is a good thing.
But when my MacBook sleeping, waking it is a similar experience to turning on the iPad. Fast enough that it doesn’t even matter.
Boot time/wake up time is one of the best things about the CR-48. Most evenings I rarely get long periods of time to sit at a computer. I do however get a few minutes here and a few minutes there. With the CR-48 it is nice because I open it up and its ready to go. If it is off, it still takes about the same about of time for the CR-48 to boot as it takes for my laptop to wake up from sleeping.
Tim, is there some great benefit from shutting down versus sleeping? Why shut down?
I normally don’t shut down the CR-48, but one plus to shutting down is power savings. I rarely go a couple days without using it, I normally use it a few times a day, and charge it every couple days. If I know I won’t be using it for days, I would consider shutting it down over sleeping, because it is less harsh on the battery than draining it all the way down.
My habits are different with the CR-48 vs my laptop. The CR-48 wakes up fast so if I’m going away for 5 minutes, I will close the lid and put it to sleep. With the laptop, I only put the laptop to sleep if I know I won’t be using it for 30+ minutes.
I have started shutting down my laptop now that I have the CR-48. Now I might go all week without touching my windows laptop, and every time I would go to use it, the battery would be dead. (I have a desktop at work to use, and a desktop at home that I use once in a while, maybe 10% of my home useage)