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I use my laptop for presentations and meetings and the boot up time is quite embarrassing.

Normally I just start it up before the meeting on my way in but I don't think its good for the lifetime of my laptop as I have to juggle my laptop with other papers. What I'm looking for is a minimalistic OS which can boot up in a few seconds (1 or 2 secs will be awesome).

The features it should have is:

1) Video Player.

2) Word Processing and Spread Sheets.

3) Web Browser with Flash player and Silver Light support.

4) Multi-Boot (It should co-exist in harmony with my current OS which happens to be Windows 7)

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you should take advantage of the sleep function... or if you want a lightweight system start with a bare linux distribution and build it up the way you need it using something like openbox. – Arctor Apr 7 '11 at 14:42
This depends on several factors. There are many operating systems that can boot very quickly on reasonable hardware, and these include several instant-on solutions for laptops and netbooks based on Splashtop. I feel this question is too broad. – DragonLord Apr 7 '11 at 14:42
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closed as not constructive by studiohack♦ Apr 7 '11 at 15:21

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3 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

What you're looking for is ChromeOS from Google.

Watch this video and marvel at the bootup speeds...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTFfl7AjNfI

Of course, that sort of boot-up speed is only possible on specific hardware made for ChromeOS, and "Chromium OS", the open source distribution of it, isn't very stable or usable yet.

There are some very light and cut-down versions of Linux around that boot up pretty quickly.

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I didn't think there was a Sliverlight for Chrome. – ultrasawblade Apr 7 '11 at 14:41
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There will be one day... M$ will buckle under pressure from the mighty Google... – Majenko Apr 7 '11 at 14:43
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up vote 1 down vote

You may want to check out Phoenix HyperSpace.

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up vote 1 down vote

boot time depends on a good many things, and how much you are willing to tune it.

If you have a system that only loads necessary drivers, is compiled for speed optimisation, and uses a few other tricks, it'll load much faster - lenovo is claiming 30 second windows 7 boots, and on the linux front, even with bog standard ubuntu - you can turn off excess start up processes and getting them to boot in parallel on ubuntu - even trim it down to around 19 seconds

so, its a matter of picking an OS you know and tuning it.

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