Feature Articles

All About the Google Chrome OS

By Aloysius Low - 23 Jan 2011

Of Boot Timings and Instant On

Verified Boot

During our brief time with the Cr-48, we were pretty much impressed with the speed of the notebook, especially the Instant-On features. While the original design intent in 2009 was to have a very quick booting machine of 7 seconds, the 2010/11 Cr-48 has a longer boot time of 13 seconds. This is because of a change in plans by doing a verified boot process that instead takes a little longer to start up.

While the OS doesn't check for the stuff it doesn't have (floppy disk drives anyone?) on boot anymore, when turned on, the notebook starts checking to ensure that nothing has been compromised. It starts at the firmware level, then on to the kernel, window manager and then Chrome itself. If there are any issues or security breaches, the notebook would then replace the current image with a backup.

If the backup is also corrupted, it will then start looking for another backup. If all the backups are in any way compromised, there's still the option of downloading an image from the Internet and re-imaging the device. Best part is, you don't have to worry about losing any data - everything is already stored online and you just have to sign in for it to be restored via the cloud. It's so easy to do that that Liu reimages his Cr-48 every morning just for build testing purposes.

Instant On

It may take 13 seconds to reboot the Cr-48, but resume from standby is almost instantaneous.

With the change in boot times due to enhanced security, Google has instead decided to focus on yet another aspect of the notebook - instant on from standby. This makes a lot of sense from a user perspective, especially when Google claims that the notebook can last 7-8 days in just standby mode.

"One of things that we realise that is people are actually spend a lot less time rebooting the machines and most of the time they just have it in sleep mode and they just resume it. And so, we actually spend a lot more time focusing on that and making sure that is super, super quick," says Liu.

When the Cr-48 is opened, you'll find that it's instantly connected to the WiFi and the screen turns on immediately. If it sounds extremely familiar, well it is, because it's just like something you'll find from a smartphone or a tablet using a mobile-centric OS. This seems to be right move to take, as most other notebooks out there do take a while to resume from standby. The only real comparison right now would be the newer Apple MacBook Air, which feels just as snappy when woken from resume.

"It's really nice, just knowing that if you close the lid it will come back as soon as you're ready. This means I don't walk around with my laptop open all the time," quipped Liu.

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