Intel Modifies Asus Eee to Boot in 5 Seconds

Breaking the five second barrier:

So many want to see Instant On systems, and it certainly makes sense to see that on Netbooks. A couple of Intel Engineers at a recent Linux conference did some hacking and were showing of a Asus Eee PC that cold boots into a Fedora desktop in five seconds. Turns out they knocked out a couple of services that they felt were redundant and created a patch that allows read-ahead operations. That last move allows things to happen concurrently and not sequentially.

Also intriguing the same process allowed them to boot a Lenovo notebook with a HDD in 10 seconds.

Via SlashGear

If laptop/netbook manufacturers could combine this with 8+ hours of battery life into a small form-factor tablet PC, that would be a mobile computing dream come true. Near-instant on/off could potentially stretch the useful life of a device like this to much longer than the rated battery life by simply shutting it off for a few minutes when it's not being used. (That's how I used to use my HP Jornada 820 and other instant-on devices I've owned over the years.) The flexibility this could add -- particularly to smaller computing devices -- cannot be overstated.

(HT Kevin Tofel)