[villalobos]

http://www.electronista.com/articles...times.lawsuit/

I really liked the bit about the "lawyer experimented about cases involving long boot times".

I can see the commercial now. "Have you, or one you love, suffered from unjustified long boot times? We can help you!"

[Big Mac]

Yeah, it is humorous. Lawyers are trying to argue that employees should be paid for the down time caused by booting. Unless employees are prevented from "clocking in" during the morning boot up, I don't see how one can argue they're actually not getting paid. The arguments I have seen argue more about lost productivity than lost wages, but if there's any liability there it would be M$'s (and Apple's to an extent), not the employers.

[ghporter]

There are a lot of places where you DO clock in on a computer. Of course it's kind of stupid to make the time-clock computer one that you turn off every day...

[starman]

I leave my computers on. That way I just pick up from where I left off.

[SSharon]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

There are a lot of places where you DO clock in on a computer. Of course it's kind of stupid to make the time-clock computer one that you turn off every day...

Where I work, everyone clocks in on their own machine. We don't seem to care much about electricity usage so everything stays on all night.

[Electronic Gadgets Guy]

When I used a Mac at work I set it up so that it booted itself ready for me coming into the office. People used to think I was there even when I was on holiday!

[SSharon]

Originally Posted by Electronic Gadgets Guy 

When I used a Mac at work I set it up so that it booted itself ready for me coming into the office. People used to think I was there even when I was on holiday!

time clocks aside, you had your computer automatically log you in?

[Gankdawg]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

Yeah, it is humorous. Lawyers are trying to argue that employees should be paid for the down time caused by booting. Unless employees are prevented from "clocking in" during the morning boot up, I don't see how one can argue they're actually not getting paid. The arguments I have seen argue more about lost productivity than lost wages, but if there's any liability there it would be M$'s (and Apple's to an extent), not the employers.

The problem is that employees are expected to be working at their start time, say 8:00. The claims are that it takes anywhere from 15-30 minutes to boot up their computer and that employees are required so that means they must arrive at their station at 7:30-7:45 to turn on their computers so that they can be working at 8:00. What they are not being paid for is that 15-30 minutes early they must arrive to wait for their company-provided computer to boot.

Microsoft has no liability in this at all. As has been discussed at length, computer boot times can vary wildly based on a huge number of variables.

[shifuimam]

That's pretty retarded. Vista Enterprise boots up noticeably faster than XP on my laptop. If you have it setup to run a ton of crap at boot, then yeah - you're going to see lag times between turning it on and being able to start opening apps.

But thirty to sixty minutes? I'm not buying it.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by shifuimam 

That's pretty retarded. Vista Enterprise boots up noticeably faster than XP on my laptop. If you have it setup to run a ton of crap at boot, then yeah - you're going to see lag times between turning it on and being able to start opening apps.

But thirty to sixty minutes? I'm not buying it.

A lot of proprietary software is horrible in terms of how long it takes to start. And depending on how the machine is set up, it could be running a (shudder!) boot script a lá autoexec.bat that starts things one program at a time... Truly awful stuff is still out there. And going cheap on computers for the workplace (particularly retail) is a very popular way of saving money, so you put together a very inefficient boot setup and really slow hardware and you can indeed have really bad boot times. Not to mention stuff that has to contact some distant end server over the local 300 baud credit card machine phone line...

[Eug]

Put more than 512 MB memory in the machine, delete the extra downloaded crap, and problem solved.