On Friday at GEL 2009, I met Thomas Deng, a co-founder of DeviceVM which makes Splashtop. Then on Saturday, I noticed a ZDNet story on Techmeme about Presto. Both Splashtop and Presto are so-called instant-on solutions which are essentially miniature Linux distros that boot in a couple of seconds and give you a web browser with Internet access and a few other goodies.
My comment to Thomas was something like “that’s impressive” when I found out how many PCs had shipped with Splashtop. But then I told him that I already have “true instant-on without Splashtop” (and without Presto). Whe he asked what it was, I said “a Mac with an SSD." And I am not kidding. My Mac boots in only about 30 seconds, but more importantly, when I wake it up from sleep, the machine is fully up and running by the time I have the lid open.
I have always in the past carried my laptop in sleep mode for a shorter wake-up time but usually had to reboot once every 10 cycles or though due to Windows hanging in some weird way. Now with my Mac I go for weeks without shutting off my machine and have really restarted only for software updates. That means I get to enjoy instant-on the whole time and we are not talking some minimal Linux distro but a hugely powerful full fledged machine.
So if you are on Windows and want instant on, instead of adding extra software, I highly recommend switching to a Mac with an SSD. If you are on a Mac already and don’t like waiting, the SSD is the way to go.
