Quick overview:
HotStart offers various applications (e.g. music player, picture viewer, DVD player) at the touch of a button - without starting the operating system! How does it work? Read on... [By Sandro Villinger]
Windows Vista consists of thousands of system files, dozens of processes, lots of drivers and a multitude of technologies. It takes a lot of time for such an operating system to start up and the many parallel Windows operations consume a lot of computer resources. But what if you are on the road and just want to watch a DVD on your notebook?
Actually, you only need the graphics card, the sound card, the DVD drive, a few control processes and DVD playback software such as WinDVD.exe. At this point, thousands of other processes such as Windows Update, the firewall, network connections, Firewire, USB or device drivers are completely unnecessary. You also don't need a Windows sidebar, antivirus software or even the wallpaper! However, all these things eat up system resources and therefore battery life on notebooks. And of course it takes time for such a fully loaded operating system to start. So no comparison with a portable DVD player, to stay with the comparison...
HotStart comes into play
Windows Vista is the first to use the so-called "Windows HotStart" technology. Notebook or computer manufacturers can assign one or more buttons on the housing to a specific action, such as music playback or DVD player. When you press this button, the notebook starts up and only the process (e.g. WinDVD.exe) and some basic drivers for playback are loaded. These drivers must all comply with the WDDM specifications (Windows Device Driver Model), which is now the case for all Vista drivers.
How does it work?
Unfortunately, it is not possible to set up Hotstart yourself. However, the necessary registration keys do exist, as Microsoft itself provides on the Whitepaper on this page describes! On a notebook, you will find the device ID "PNP0C32" under "HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetEnumACPI" on a HotStart-compatible device. Unfortunately, we could not find this on any of our test notebooks (MacBook Pro, Acer Ferrari 1000, HP Tablet PC tx1000). Will there soon be a way to configure HotStart yourself? So far we have not been able to find any instructions, but we will keep you up to date!
Yours, Sandro Villinger
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