Shaving Off Boot Load Times
In university, I became obsessed about reducing boot times on my Windows machine. Even without a password, it could take several minutes for the computer to load and be ready for first use. I’d remove programs, play with the registry, play with config. However, it would get to a point where there was nothing left to remove but the load times were still slow.
That’s when I’d look at the hard drive. My 7200 RPM HDD could be at 80% capacity so I’d try to remove old files I didn’t need or, while leaving the computer on overnight, defrag the hard drive. Physically placing fragments of data closer together on a moving hard drive made programs load faster.
At some point, I gave up and accepted that my computer was just slow. It would be a decade later when I got my first laptop for work that had a solid state drive. This was the aha moment that load times were the hard drive’s (and Window’s) fault. It took less than a quarter of the time to start the computer and everything just worked when you clicked it.
There was also no sound. The sound of a hard disk spinning could be anthropomorphized as the computer thinking. Gone. The computer was now a cold (literally) calculation machine.
What I do miss from that time and I’ve had to re-adopt is the sense of investment that went into using a computer. There was a sense of routine to prepare the work. Steven Pressfield talks about a routine of summoning the muse to help us do our work. That’s what waiting for the computer to load felt like. Boot load times might not be a factor but we still need a few moments to reflect to make sure we do work with meaning.
