As we connect through this blog and through all of those talking about Windows 7 it is clear that folks have a lot of passion around many topics. We learned early on about the passion around the boot/startup sequence and how important it was for that to go by quickly! At the same time, we know that it is really dull to watch a HDD light blink when resuming a machine from hibernate or powering up a machine. To improve this first connection with people, we set out to improve the boot sequence—jazz it up if you will. It sounds pretty easy, but as we looked into solving this we found it is a pretty significant engineering challenge. Our goal was to have fun while having no impact on the boot performance of the system. To explain this engineering and describe the boot sequence, Karen Wong, a program manager on our Core User Experience feature team, authored this post. --Steven
Windows 7 Boot Sequence, Pearl Animation Removed
You may also be wondering what happened to the startup sound. In Vista, the sound had to be synchronized with the pearl animation to produce the highest quality experience. This has potential performance impact on some hardware, as we require the system’s sound stack to be loaded to complete the pearl sequence. In the cases when we are waiting for the system’s sound playback to be ready, a delay can occur in getting to the desktop. As such, we changed the sound to now play asynchronously, anytime after the logon screen loads. On most hardware that we tested, this is right when the logon screen displays. We heard customer feedback in Vista that the sound played and caught your attention, but boot was not yet complete. So in addition to performance benefits, this change also improves the user experience by letting users know when their machine is ready for use.
The sum of the boot code optimizations and removal of the pearl animation from Vista enabled us to add a rich, high-quality animation during boot, with no increase in the time it takes a user to reach the desktop.
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do you have a video of the animation?
