Windows 8 is to showcase a faster new boot method which will greatly reduce the time for the OS to get up and running.

The new procedure should slash boot times by 65%, and Microsoft have demonstrated an SSD notebook booting in just eight seconds. Windows President Steve Sinofsky reported in a blog post that Windows 8 has been designed to reduce the number of required boots.

According to Microsoft’s director of product management, Windows 8 will offer a new shutdown method, a ‘hybrid of traditional cold boot and resuming from hibernate’.

Currently, in Windows 7, a full shutdown ends the user’s sessions as well as terminating the services and devices in the OS’s kernel sessions. Windows 8 will still close the user’s sessions, but the kernel session will only hibernate rather than terminate. Thus the system state and memory content will be saved to a file on disk , to be read by the OS and restored to memory on resuming. Reading the ‘hiberfile’ and reinitializing drivers from it is 30-70% faster, though full Win-7 style shutdowns will still be an option where necessary.

Windows 8 will also use a ‘multi-phase resume’ system which distributes restart tasks amongst all cores, acelerating boot time regardless of shutdown mode – hibernate, cold boot, or the new ‘hibersleep’ mode.