Startup Performance

Play around with hotkeys and see if anything makes a difference. Disabling USB 2.0 sometimes makes things a little faster, but I agree that overall POA is a dog, compared to the competition. But to be fair, Utimaco's preboot is the most feature rich compared to others; the rest just have a dummy DOS-like screen not unlike TrueCrypt.

This is the most common complaint I get from my users.

Dimitri:  The parent company of my company uses McAfee (formerly Safeboot) Encryption and I tested it pretty thoroughly before buying SafeGuard Enterprise.  I have to say that it's POA is pretty quick and full featured.  Other features (specifically, USB encryption and port protection) were severely lacking at the time, so we ended up going with SGN, but it is possible for the POA to be both fully-featured and quick to boot.

I agree 100%, I too wish POA was a little bit faster in Utmaco land. I was told the reason for the slowness is because it's an OS by itself, a modified OpenBSD kernel that has been secured and changed to work for encryption purposes. Also, I think two-factor atuhentication is they key reason why Utimaco's preboot is so complex and therefore slow -- in EU two-factor authentication is a standard, not an option for majority of government organization, and I think at least as of few years ago, SGN's support for two-factor at preboot was unparalleled.
It's not an excuse, merely an explanation. :-)

I can understand how some organizations might benefit from the robust POA environment.  It would be nice to be able to choose between a basic POA and the full featured POA.  Hopefully performance is on the radar for improvement in the next version.

This is an excellent thought, actually. We don't use POA (bypass it), so basic preboot similar to Safeguard Easy would be more then adequate and speed things up nicely.

Wait. So you don't use preboot authentication at all? You systems just boot straight to Windows? Or, are you using a simplified preboot authentication function that I'm not aware of. Just want to make sure I'm not missing something since I'm new to the product.

Yep, we're bypassing POA altogether and boot directly to Windows. I know it's hard to believe but this is the case; we use POA strictly for C/R purposes.

is there any speed improvement or update in v 5.6 ? 

Nope.  No improvement in POA load time.

ok, so it is more like a compatibility mode to support more platform.