boot

The countdown is on, my friends. The countdown to the fastest booting OS, that is.

Forget those operating system sloths, Mac OS X and Windows (any flavor). The gauntlet was thrown down when the first mainstream commercial fast-boot OS appeared on a small solid-state drive (SSD) that had been pruned to operate on an ASUS eeePC.

Granted, the fast seek times for data access with the SSD contributed to Xandros's (the eeePC OS) speedy boot time, but users became enamored with the quick, "less than one minute," access to their apps. Thus was born the race to the fastest boot time.