Day: September 30, 2009

Reducing boot times on PCs — Lenovo’s Howard Locker

Howard Locker carries the wonderful title of Master Inventor at Lenovo and is one of the more engaging and smart people I know inside the company. We recently announced our Enhanced Experience initstive to optimize the upcoming Windows 7 release on our ThinkPads and IdeaPads. I admit I was a little skeptical — was this “Ammonia D” marketing? — then I saw Howard quoted in ComputerWorld talking about the actual steps he and his team did over three years to drive every millisecond out of the boot sequence.

Kevin Beck and Kevin Walker in Lenovo Training Solutions pointed a camera at Howard this morning and got him to explain some of what he and his team did to reduce boot times.  Getting wireless drivers down from five seconds to a few milliseconds ….. I love this stuff. Matt Kohut at our Inside the Box blog also delves deep into the boot time issue.

Join The Mercury Brief

Join The Mercury Brief.

Former colleague Bob Page — Olympic buddy and excellent global communicator — has an interesting project at The Mercury Brief — think of it as an anthology of great communicators.

Windows 7, Lenovo, and the Death of Crapware

“Lenovo’s additions, by and large, actually increase the value of their PCs to users. This is not usually the case with PC makers, in my experience.”

Interesting piece on Crapware — the software applications, trials, and other non-OS software PC makers put on their PCs to subsidy costs; and the suite of system level utilities Lenovo puts on ThinkPads – ThinkVantage technologies. Win7 puts an new emphasis on our system level tweaks to improve boot and shut down times.  My X200 can take up to five minutes (I need to time it) to fully boot (and longer after than to light up enabling applications such as my VPN) so boot time is a major issue with an “always on” experience.

This time Lenovo is hammering hard on stuff the user will never see, but will experience as drivers are streamlined, and system level tweaks are making a huge difference.

via Windows 7, Lenovo, and the Death of Crapware.

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