Microsoft has a plan to make Windows boot faster. Their idea is to have a super-fast booting subset of the OS that gives you limited access to certain applications.

As I recall, we used to have this, back in 1990. It was called DOS. You could boot the PC in about 15 seconds and run Word Perfect or whatever. Then if you were feeling masochistic, you could type Win and wait two minutes for the GUI to load.

This is not what instant-on means to most people and to suggest that it might be a "feature" is ridiculous. Even Microsoft knows it's ridiculous, which is why it is asking for customer feedback on the idea.

Well, here's my feedback. Making Windows start faster by having it do less is a backwards step, not a forward one. What they need to do is provide the same services but provide them more efficiently or start them on demand or store the system state in flash or something. Not just do less. You can make a car that accelerates to its top speed in five seconds, if you limit the top speed to ten miles an hour.

There is undoubtedly a lot of bloat in Vista. Things that they could skip and most of us would never miss. But none of these are what Microsoft is planning to omit in its rush to boot early. They are talking about things like your internet connection and your external drives. You know, things you actually use. And there isn't really any way around that because Windows (and every other OS) is designed in a modular way with separate chunks of code to perform discrete tasks.

In my alternative, (ie completely unrealistic) world, Windows would be like progressive JPEG. You would boot almost immediately into a monochrome desktop with very simple icons, and a network connection that supported TCP/IP but not FTP or streaming video.

Then, seamlessly, the "resolution" of the OS would improve. So the graphics would gradually get prettier and the features richer. Likewise, your word processor would initially just support raw text and then features like spell checking and advanced formatting would trickle in after a minute or two.

Or we could just go back to leaving our PCs on standby and Microsoft could divert its development budget to pay for our electricity bills.