VIDEO: 8 second fast boot demo in Windows 8 OS

Microsoft are tuning Windows 8 to deliver MacBook Air style superfast boot times.

While it’s still a few seconds off of being truly “instant on”, Windows 8 will boot up in as little as 8 seconds.

This is possible thanks to a hybrid hibernation/shut down option that the Microsoft engineers have built for Windows 8, saving a Windows 8 kernal session that, unlike the regular hibernation mode, doesn’t save open programs too.

“Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk,” said Steven Sinofsky on the MSDN blog.

“If you’re not familiar with hibernation, we’re effectively saving the system state and memory contents to a file on disk (hiberfil.sys) and then reading that back in on resume and restoring contents back to memory.

“Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems.”

To see the boot time for yourself, hit the video above.