November 5th, 2007
Phoenix’s New Hyperspace Technology to Allow Quick-Boot Access to Applications
By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews
The pain and suffering of watching your PC boot … slowly … is something we all live with. No matter what people like Microsoft say about Vista and boot, it just isn’t a speed demon. Phoenix Technologies emailed me a press release today about a new product called HyperSpace, which is designed to allow you quick-boot access to commonly used applications such as your browser, email, etc. etc.
Basically during the boot process, you’ll press a function key to enter the Hyperspace platform, and thereby access the applications.
Now, this isn’t totally new, as laptop makers have given users the ability to, for example, play a DVD on their multimedia notebooks without booting Windows for some time now. What is new is access to more useful apps, and also the fact that Phoenix Technologies is one of the largest BIOS developers, and has been since the days of DOS. This gives it a better chance to succeed in getting integration of this technology than most.
The press release doesn’t say, but I’d hazard to guess the “mini-OS” would be Linux based. Naturally, you won’t be running your Windows-based programs on it (and it would give you yet another partition to back up, probably), but it would help if you just want to login and browse while waiting at the airport, or at a coffee shop, without booting the whole system.
We Say: Phoenix also says the system could boost battery life by up to 50% (I’ll believe it when I see it).
John Corliss says:
That’s nice, but I’m still waiting for a computer that will instantly do a full boot to a state I set. IMO, there’s no excuse for this not having been possible a long time ago. Non-volitile memory has been around for a long time. I see no reason (although probably at this point the issue is cost) why a BIOS couldn’t be created that can memorize what the RAM looks like after an initial boot. This fixed-in-place setting could be re-configurable either by the user or whenever a critical OS update needed to. Waiting for the system to boot the way it does now though, is a serious PITA.
November 7th, 2007 at 4:15 am