Engineering the Windows 7 Boot

As we connect through this blog and through all of those talking about
Windows 7 it is clear that folks have a lot of passion around many
topics. We learned early on about the passion around the boot/startup
sequence and how important it was for that to go by quickly! At the
same time, we know that it is really dull to watch a HDD light blink
when resuming a machine from hibernate or powering up a machine. To
improve this first connection with people, we set out to improve the
boot sequence—jazz it up if you will. It sounds pretty easy, but as we
looked into solving this we found it is a pretty significant
engineering challenge. Our goal was to have fun while having no impact
on the boot performance of the system. To explain this engineering and
describe the boot sequence, Karen Wong, a program manager on our Core
User Experience feature team, authored this post. --Steven

Design

We use the word "personality" to refer to some of the characteristics
of software that connect emotionally with people. 'Light' and 'energy'
are some of the terms we use to describe the personality of Windows 7.
As we designed Windows 7 it became clear that in order to showcase
these elements of Win7's personality, we needed go above and beyond
what we did with Vista's boot visuals.