Cutting the Waste of Waiting with PC Bootup

In Age of Impatience, Cutting PC Start Time - NYTimes.com

Honestly — how many of us just sat and stared at our PC when it
booted up this morning? According to the NY Times, many of us
do.

It is the black hole of the digital age — the
three minutes it can take for your computer to boot up, when there
is nothing to do but wait, and wait, and wait some more before you
can log on and begin multitasking at hyper-speed.

Some people stare at their screen and fidget. Others pace or grab a
cup of coffee. “Half the time, I go brush my teeth,”
said Monica Loos, 40, who is starting a business selling stationery
online from her home in San Francisco.

It’s such an obvious situation, you’d wonder why it’s “news.”
Imagine that…. do something else instead of staring at the
screen?

There’s a direct parallel to Lean concepts in a manufacturing
environment. Lean people preach that workers shouldn’t stand and
stare at their machine (CNC or otherwise) while it’s running…
that’s waste. The same should be true with office workers, right?
It also reminds of Bruce Henderson in the the “Toast Kaizen” video
when he stands and stares at his toaster while it’s toasting. It’s
such obvious waste, but it’s a waste that’s often ignored in
different workplaces.

It’s true in hospital labs — when you have a piece of testing
automation, the highly skilled Medical Technologist doesn’t have to
stand and wastch the expensive piece of automation doing its work.
Those of you familiar with “cellular” layouts in manufacturing
(where an employee, yes, often a single person walks a loop around
the inside of a U-shaped cell) would recognize the concept being
applied in many hospital laboratories. Instead of “one person, one
machine” (which many “non-Lean” factories and some hospital labs
have), you can have one person running multiple machines.

That said, it *is* horribly annoying that computers take so long to
boot up. I haven’t timed them, but I’m pretty certain that my
MacBook and my converted Linux laptop each boot up faster than
Windows 2000 or Windows XP (yes, I’m a geekazoid).

Some computer makers are working on faster-booting machines:

“It’s ridiculous to ask people to wait a couple of
minutes,” said Sergei Krupenin, executive director of
marketing of DeviceVM, a company that makes a quick-boot program
for PC makers. “People want instant-on.”

Hewlett-Packard,
Dell and Lenovo are rolling out machines that give people
access to basic functions like e-mail and a Web browser in 30
seconds or less. Asus, a Taiwanese company that is the
world’s largest maker of the circuit boards at the center of
every PC, has begun building faster-booting software into its
entire product line.

What about Microsoft?

Even
Microsoft, whose bloated Windows software is often blamed for
sluggish start times, has pledged to do its part in the next
version of the operating system, saying on a company blog that
“a very good system is one that boots in under 15
seconds.” Today only 35 percent of machines running the
latest version of Windows, called Vista, boot in 30 seconds or
less, the blog notes. (Apple
Macintoshes tend to boot more quickly than comparable Windows
machines but still feel glacially slow to most users.)

My MacBook isn’t glacially slow, as long as you don’t stare at it.
In fact, I rarely have to reboot my Mac — the sleep mode wakes up
and works much more reliably than any Windows machine I’ve ever
used…