No-one wants to wait forever for a computer to boot up. Yet that’s exactly what many Windows users have to suffer each day. But slow-booting computers don’t have to be the rule. There are actually operating systems out there that boot up in no time flat.
Christian Loebering from Germany’s PC-Welt magazine names two good reasons for using a quick starting operating system. “For one,” he says, no doubt echoing the sentiments of many, “I don’t want to wait around forever for the computer to boot up just to download a couple of email messages.”
Second, he notes, many of the quicker operating systems, which tend to run on Linux, are less exposed to attacks than Windows, and hence fundamentally somewhat more secure. That last statement has lost some of its punch with the advent of Windows 7, however, which is better than its predecessors in this regard.
One of those rapid-boot systems is known as Moblin. It is open source and can be modified or redistributed without restriction. The Linux-based operating system can be downloaded as an image file from http://moblin.org. At only 754 megabytes in total, it fits comfortably onto a USB stick. It can even boot right from that stick. The process takes only 30 seconds or so on a current laptop, c’t magazine found after running tests.
Android has recently enjoyed its breakthrough as an OS for mobile phones. The Google software also runs on traditional computers. “LiveAndroid” is the variant for this and can boot directly from a CD or USB stick. The best part is that you can try it out without having to modify your computer at all. That practice is common to many Linux versions and Android is in fact based on the free operating system.
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