Windows Vista Boot & Crysis Load Times

For this test we use disk imaging software to create an exact copy of the same Windows Vista Home Premium install on every hard disk drive before recording the time taken to boot from the BIOS logo screen and a working Vista desktop, using the Windows Vista Welcome Centre as the chequered flag.

Other than the Vista Welcome Centre, all other start-up processes were disabled prior to the imaging process. The boot time was recorded using a standard handheld stopwatch, with the test repeated five times and an average taken from the middle three results to produce the figures below.

We've retested a number of hard disk drives for our Crysis level load and Windows Vista boot time tests following some BIOS and boot optimisations to produce more accurate results. However, results are still recorded with a stopwatch, so even taking into account that we repeat tests multiple times there's still a very slight margin of error.



For analysis of these results, please see the Results Analysis page.