50th Anniversary of invention of disk drives 4587

Ah, but Windows already does this to a certain extent. Once the GUI is up, there's still a lot of disk activity going on, and that mini-hourglbutt is often displayed next to the mouse pointer. I tend to wait until all disk activity has ceased before trying to do anything; the disk is being thrashed hard enough that there's little point trying to accomplish anything in the meantime. As you said, it gives the appearance of fast booting, but that illusion shatters as soon as you call its bluff.

One thing I've always hated is when a computer lies to me. I've seen it in mainframe systems as well - an online monitor would announce on the console that it was ready, but if you immediately tried to log on, you'd either be ignored or get a message stating that it wasn't ready. Thus I have little use for a window that appears quickly, unless the program is either really ready for use, or displays an unappealing but honest message stating that it's not quite ready yet, please wait...

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