Who uses Suspend To RAM

I have used it a few times but never really to any total success. On my old setup it seemed to work OK except my ADSL modem would never work afer resuming and this the machine needed a reboot. On my new setup it works sometimes, hangs others + if it does work there are always some anomalies or another. Shame really as the idea is great as my XP now takes ages to boot it's loaded down with so much rubbish. My Amiga 1200 used to boot from HD in 2 secs and say "fully operational" with a speech synthesizer. Roll on instant access PCs. Also how much power do they use in standby mode?

I want a PC that boots as quickly as the one Jimmy Nesbit buys in that TV ad for Yellow Pages (or whatever it is). :P

LOL

"My Amiga 1200 used to boot from HD in 2 secs"

Yeh, Amigas were great like that. I had a real shock when I got my first PC. Dispite being a good spec machine at the time it was still outperformed by my old A1200.

Jason.

I use hibernate all the time. It works as expected but on some occasions the screen remains 'off' and I have no choice but to restart.

If I use standby my PC appears to be off (no fans running) but it suspect it keeps the 5V line running to maintain the RAM contents. It's faster for restarting the PC but a power glitch/cut means the current state will be lost.

I never really use it, but when i've selected the option accidentally I have no problems at all resumming except for my own short fuse and frustration at having wanted to switch off and now having to wait. I think background tasks are most likely the cause of problems with the feature.

I get that screen remaining off problem too. It's annoyingly inconsistant.

Panda Internet Security seems to not like it when I hibernate my PC. Any number of its different components crash on restart.

If it wasn't so darn good in all other respects, I'd be annoyed. My PC starts up pretty quick from a normal boot, so I'm not too bothered. Hardly ever switch the thing off anyway, spends too much time leeching from usenet :)

I just wish Windows had install options to reduce the re-boot times:

* minumum
* typical
* bloated to hell (Default)

I can't image Vista improving on things either. Especially with all the 3D gunk. Still, at least I can spin Notepad around in 3D. How have we managed without such a 'feature' ?

I use hibernate all the time and have never had a problem, besides PuTTy windows understandably not being connected anymore.

I don't understand why Windows can't take a hibernation-style snapshot of a clean boot and use that when I want to reboot - it'd be so much faster!

Jim: I would bet money that Vista will start a good deal faster than XP. All our PC's will start faster once we get rid of the reliance on the decades old BIOS. This is happening, and Vista has support for such motherboards. Of course, I'm not planning on upgrading my board for at least 3 years, so I'll have to live with it a while longer :-/

I've been using 'Hibernate' for months now -- I assigned it to my PC's power button in the Control Panel (Under Power Options), and never had any issues with hardware devices not working with it.

The only problem I had initially was that 'hibernation' support was disabled, and the option greyed out. Supposedly that was a side-effect of the DaemonTools virtual CD/DVD mounting software... Then one day it magically un-greyed itself, and has been working ever since.

Works like a charm on both of my computers, and reduces my boottime from a minute and a half to 20 seconds or so.

Somehow I doubt it -- so far each new version of windows has taken longer to start than the previous version, regardless of what hardware you throw at it.

One major reason some of the startup times as so long, is hardware initialization & auto-detection: A good chunk of the time it's simply waiting for possible hardware devices to respond and register themselves to the system, which really can't be sped up much. If you don't wait long enough, a bunch of devices would simply stop working since windows couldn't 'see' them in time.

In my experience, XP x64 boots faster than XP, XP boots faster than 2K, 2K boots faster than 98, 98 boots faster than 95. The only anomaly is ME, which boots slower than all of them combined.

XP x64 reaches the desktop from off in 10 seconds on my main PC. I had 2K on it before and it took closer to 50 seconds. Takes 2 minutes to shutdown though :P

the STR problem is usually due to a setting on your motherboard.

For some reason on my last system and the one prior, i could either Power USB devices while the system was off, OR... Allow system standby. The setting was done via a motherboard jumper.

Check your Mobo's manual :)

Also, system standby requires a certain amount of current from the PSU. I dont see that being the issue these days.

I personally have no problem with Hybrnate however.

Agreed. My XP installation is up and running, from a cold start, in under 15 seconds.

In the very near future all Pc's will use static ram instead of magnetic drives. That will speed up boot up etc no end.

Well thats m opion anyways, static ram is very cheap these days and wont be long till its a viable option.

WarrenM, are you talking about to the login screen (if you have one) or to the point that the hdd stops loading all the services, startup items (antivirus, etc).?

Mine is fast to the login screen, but then, another minute or so before hdd stops loading everything else after i login.

May be a little further off than you think -- We're not just waiting for prices to come down and sizes to increase. the current static RAM technology has some major limitations regarding how many writes are possible. IIRC, few do more than 100,000 writes before they start having trouble remembering things properly.

while that may sound like a lot, don't underestimate exactly how much gets written to your HD (your virtual memory swapfile is changing continuously, and it's near impossible to run windows reliably without virtual memory, no matter how much RAM you have)

There's a ton of alternative solutions like holographic storage 'just a few years away', but they have been just a few years away for many years now.

I mean all the way in. Admittedly this is a pretty new machine but I've been very anal about not installing anything I don't absolutely need and only turning on the services I actually require.

For it to be a fair test you have to use the same hardware to boot the OS.

A while ago I had a machine running Me, 2000, XP and Linux. Me loads in about 4 seconds from post with the fast hardware and a pretty clean build. 2000 was a good bit longer, XP was more or less the same as 2000, and the Linux took (compartively) ages.

If you copy the files to the HD then boot Me installs in about 5 minutes too, which is quite funny when you are used to the 1/2 an hour it used to take.

Obviously XP is massively more useful and stable than 9x but if you compare like with like you will find 9x boots a LOT faster.

Oh and I find that Suspend to Ram works well on laptops, not too great on my workstation or games machine. Depends what services and apps you are running and wether they "like" S3 I think.

Darkheart

Did you build a custom Linux kernel? If not, it's hardly a fair comparison.

"Did you build a custom Linux kernel? If not, it's hardly a fair comparison."

WTF?

All the other OS's were out of the box, so was the Linux one...

Darkheart