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MS to license Intel software

To speed software start-up, Microsoft will incorporate Intel?s Application Launch Accelerator technology into Windows 98.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
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Brooke Crothers
Microsoft (MSFT) will license Intel (INTC) technology that boosts software speed.

The Redmond, Washington, giant will incorporate Intel?s Application Launch Accelerator software technology into Windows 98, according to the two companies.

"The combination of Intel's Application Launch Accelerator technology and key advances in the Microsoft Windows 98 operating system will significantly shorten the time it takes for software applications to load from the hard disk drive," according to a prepared statement from the two companies. Windows 98 is due in mid-1998.

Intel has already been demonstrating a prototype of the technology on Windows 95. Beta versions of the software show dramatic improvements, reducing application launch time by up to 70 percent. This applies to the launching of applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Netscape.

Unlike existing defragmentation techniques, which arrange individual files into consecutive clusters, Intel's Application Launch Accelerator "uses new capabilities in Windows 98 to arrange data blocks used during application start-up in a sequential fashion, thereby reducing the amount of random disk access. On a hard disk drive, sequential disk accesses are many times faster than random disk accesses," according to the two companies.

These technologies will appear in the next beta release of Windows 98, expected to be available later this year.

Intel is an investor in CNET: The Computer Network.