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ZDNet has a blog post on the new Dell Linux based Instant On environment. The post talks about how this is a great thing and why this maybe something that MS maynot like so much.

My take:
It is a good thing to have instant on, booting a machine is the most frustrating time for me. But nowadays I rarely boot my laptop. It is almost always in sleep. I reboot only maybe once a couple of weeks or so when I want have installed something that wants a reboot, or I just want to do a shutdown as I may not be using the machine for a couple of days.

Also for just checking mails, calendars I use my mobile now. Surely not my laptop. I use my blackberry to do those tasks. It does that fast and with a lot less trouble.

So how big a thing is instant on? For me not too much. Becoz I usually start using my laptop if I want to do some fairly complex stuff I want to do with attachements (just viewing can be done with BB) like creating a templated doc etc, in Word or do a macro based stuff with Excel etc. So I will anyway end up using the Windows environment.

But I do see the advantage of this for people who do not use a mobile messanger or just browse something up etc. But why not just use Sleep. My laptop by default goes into sleep when I close the lid.

Someone in the comments had mentioned SideShow as an alternative from MS, but I think the best thing for MS is to work towards reducing the boot time and make the sleep mode more energy efficient.