Windows 10 Time between switching OSs

[davidhk129]

I dual boot Win 7 and Win 10 TP.

If I want to switch OS, all I have to do is to click Restart and I will be given a choice of the 2 OSs. That's nice.
The time it takes to switch to the other OS seems to be forever. That's disgusting.

Is there any way to speed up the switch over ?

 

[davehc]

I am a great fan of dual booting, when trying a new, or alternative, OS. The problem you mention has plagued me for a long time. It goes back to at least Vista. I cannot recall before that.
The problem is that the second installation takes precedence. If you then want to restart into the first installation, it apparently needs to go right back to the MBR for that OS, and reboot the whole sequence again.

But, maybe my imagination, since Windows 10, it looks like whichever you reboot to, it goes through the whole sequence again.
Feed back or enquiries to Microsoft do not get a response, so it looks like it is inevitable.

 

[Jimbo22]

I'm a fan of dual booting as well and have had this issue to for as long as I can remember. However, if in a tower and using a 2nd internal HDD and setting up the 2nd OS on that drive (there's a whole process to do this but it's not complicated) then using the F12 key at start up or a reboot to select the HDD to boot from takes as long to boot up as a single OS.

 

[strollin]

I am not a fan of dual booting which is why I use VMs to run other OSes. With my machine booted in Win 7, I can have Win 8.1 and Win 10 VMs running at the same time and switch effortlessly between them. Makes it really easy to compare how things work in each OS.

There are advantages to dual booting, but for my purposes, VMs are the way to go.

 

[Jimbo22]

Hey strollin, I agree that a VM is ultimately the best way "to test" an OS whether beta or a different OS. The VM only runs well if it has same recommended hardware components as the real PC is set up with. So for those of us who just have a modest or the bare minimum requirements for hardware, mainly laptops, then splitting the installed hardware turns the VM into a sub-par and lagging at times PC. This is IMO the biggest downfall of a VM. Which is why I prefer the dual boot option over a VM with these types of low end PC's.

I've run booth setups and for me the easiest is the dual boot setup on individual HDD's and letting me choose at boot up which one I want to run at that time. We all have are preferences...this is just mine.

 

[davehc]

Maybe just my opinion, but I do believe that running as a dual boot presents a more live experience for feedback. In any event, I run the previous OS and the current one, (8.1/Tech Preview) on two separate , but identical laptops. Certainly must be the ultimate.

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

I've noticed the lag when switching operating systems in dual boot as well.

I'm on the side of dual booting to test a new OS, at least for me I always see a big dropoff in performance when working in a VM.

Plus a lot of software that I have installed will run in both versions of Windows without reinstalling as long as the new OS is really installed on the computer, that's not the case when running in a VM.

I want to duplicate the effect of actually running the new software, in fact I've only booted back into Windows 8 a couple of times since I installed W10 TP.

I now have all of the software that I run in Windows, (games, graphic arts software, tools etc.) running in W10, and for the most part it runs as well or better than it does in 8.

Now if I could only get my keyboard lights to work. LOL

Mike

 

[strollin]

...
Plus a lot of software that I have installed will run in both versions of Windows without reinstalling as long as the new OS is really installed on the computer, that's not the case when running in a VM. ...
Mike

I'm not sure how that could even be possible since dual booting wouldn't share the same registry or have the same dlls in the system32 folder. The only way this would be possible would be for "portable" apps that have all of their files installed in a single folder and don't use the registry. It would be possible to put those types of apps on a network or usb thumb drive that the VM would have access to and run them as well.

I'm a developer for a large software company and we do most of our testing on VMs and have been doing it that way for about 10 years or so. If you have decent hardware, lagging in the VM isn't even noticeable. If we didn't have VMs, we would require hundreds more physical machines to accomplish the testing we do.

The time you need to test on actual hardware is when you need to test video drivers for your particular video card and such. VMs aren't good for game playing but for most other tasks they are superior to dual booting.

I personally don't remember the last time I messed with dual booting but I have dozens of VMs that I can bring up that run DOS, virtually every version of Windows since Win 3 (including server versions) as well as a bunch of Linux distros.

Mike - my keyboard lights work in every one of my VMs!

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

Almost all of my games i.e. The Elder Scrolls Online, Age Of Conan, The Secret World, Tomb Raider, Guild Wars 2 etc. all run from my Windows 8 installs as does Adobe Premiere Elements 12, and Steam.

I think that most of these programs automatically establish the necessary connections etc, when the are started for the first time in a new OS, most online games seem to have built in utilities to keep them repaired and working.

This is important to me because of the huge size of these programs.
I don't want to install them twice.

Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator and Poser and things like that had to be installed on Windows 10, but I installed them on a different drive than Windows 10 is on.

The Keyboard Lights problem is being shared by a lot of people running the latest update of Windows 10.
It doesn't affect everyone but a lot of people here are having the same issue, and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with what keyboard people are using, I'm using a wired Microsoft keyboard.

Like I said, it's my personal experience that I see a lot of slowdown when running in a VM, maybe it's just my computer, but I have a very fast machine with a 3.6 Ghz i7 processor, 32 gigabytes of ram, and a high end video card.

Mike

 

[ussnorway]

I'm not sure how that could even be possible since dual booting wouldn't share the same registry or have the same dlls in the system32 folder. The only way this would be possible would be for "portable" apps that have all of their files installed in a single folder and don't use the registry.

That is right... most software doesn't in fact use the registry after it has been installed.

It would be possible to put those types of apps on a network or usb thumb drive that the VM would have access to and run them as well.

Correct... a known work around for getting older games to run is instal them on a vm-oldsystem then transfer the file to your new system.

I'm a developer for a large software company and we do most of our testing on VMs and have been doing it that way for about 10 years or so. If you have decent hardware, lagging in the VM isn't even noticeable. If we didn't have VMs, we would require hundreds more physical machines to accomplish the testing we do.

IME this is in danger of missing bugs... vm-hardware is standard across all the systems and thats great but when your software goes out there in the real world it will meet people with sound cards and network cards that your company has not tested.

To be clear, vm's are a great (cheap and fast) way to test things but it only takes you up to a point.

 

[whs]

I run 10 in virtual (VMware Player). Switching between systems takes 1 second.