Microsoft revealed that the next iteration of Windows will boot too quickly to register keystrokes such as F2 or F8.
Microsoft's Building Windows 8 blog has been buzzing the last few days. Today, Redmond is talking about Windows 8 boot times. Specifically, the company is addressing the fact that the operating system can boot too quickly at times.
According to Microsoft, Windows 8 can boot in as little as seven seconds. While most people herald this as good news, Microsoft understands that some of us actually want to interrupt that boot. However, though we might want to go mucking around in the BIOS or boot from an alternative device, Microsoft's Chris Clark says there is no longer enough time for detect keystrokes like F2 or F8. Clark goes on to say that while Microsoft isn't about to sacrifice its fast boot time to preserve these functions, there is a solution for those of us that live for F8 or that little "Press F2 for Setup" message.
Microsoft solved the problem using a combination of three different solutions that allow users to do everything they could before, be it booting from a alternate device, accessing the BIOS, troubleshooting, rolling back to a restore point using System Restore, or addressing corrupt driver installations.
First of all, Windows 8 will now have a boot options menu that contains all of the troubleshooting tools, developer-focused options for Windows startup, methods for accessing the firmware's BIOS setup, and a method for booting to alternative devices. Second, there's now specific 'failover behaviors' that automatically bring up the boot options menu when there's an issue booting successfully to Windows. Lastly, there are several methods of easily reaching the boot options menu (even when nothing is wrong with Windows) that don't rely on the 'interrupt-driven' method we're all used to. These include entering the new flag prompt '/o' to shutdown.exe, holding down the Shift key while clicking Restart, or selecting 'Advanced Startup' under general settings.
To read more about the Windows 8 boot, head over to Building Windows 8.
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What is not to get? Pure marketing bullshit... 80% of the consumers dont even know what you are talking about and they believe everything the PR and Marketing departments throw at them.
Made me laugh
@13thmonkey - do you happen to have Asus P67 MoBo? or something similar? Had same issues with prolonged black screen before POST itself. Driven me mad, as Win starts 2 times faster on my SSD as POST itselt. Solved finally by recent UEFI update, takes 2 secs now. Check your mobo updates and see if it helps.
Yeah this is stupid. By default BIOS checks your RAM and attached devices first, before it even considers accessing the Harddrive. You therefore get plenty of time, and if they're talking about Safe Mode and the like (Which would make more sense), then again you shouldn't have any issues as long as you're tapping F8 from POST onwards. It'd only be possibly an issue if you're using a very fast SSD, but most people won't be, and if they ever do in the future, if you're tapping F8 onwards and still unable to bringup the boot menu, it's not because it boots so fast, but rather it's crappy programming!
No matter how fast it boots if you're tapping preboot, with each tap being 0.5 seconds or less between taps, there's no way the window of opportunity should close before you tap that key again at least once. If the window for you to press the key is less than a second, it's because it's been badly programmed and have programmed it to close the window in whatever tiny amount of time they saw fit.
Even if it was that fast, they'd just have to add 1 second delay so the window is open enough for you to get a keypress in. I don't think anyone is going to complain over one second, but they WILL complain if they can't boot into safe mode to get rid of a virus.
Stfu Microsoft and do it properly. Stop with the marketing crap. If you're going to make a crap OS at least do it without BS'ing everyone or not bothering to take even the simpliest of things into consideration when you make the damn thing. What's next, no mouse or keyboard because you don't think it'll be needed? .... oh wait, yeah I can foresee that possibility already with the way it's designed.
I know ASUS does a lot pre-start & OC checks but they dont take as long. mine had 25-30s delay before POST and clearly something was wrong. TRried few versions of UEFI update, finally last one worked. Takes 2-3 s before POST.
Asus seem to known for that issue