Oh where have all the Shutdown Controllers gone (and boot time)?

Hey guys,

After I got my Keypower 250w DC-DC converter my mp3car system was pretty much complete. Now that the system has been running for about a week, I've noticed some things I'm sure most of you have wanted to address.

First of all, the boot time into Win98se is slow as heck. takes like 45secs-1min to completely boot. Although that doesn't sound like a lot, it drags on and on when you're in the car wanting to listen to some music. I've got a Shuttle FV-24, so if any of you shuttle heads out there have found a solution to the boot speed please let me know.

Secondly, I REALLY BADLY want a shutdown controller so that when the car goes off, so does the carputer after a few moments. Then when I turn it on, it boots up. What I don't want is for it to continue running when the car is off. I searched the boards and only to find that http://www.mp3ondemand.com/ has shutdown, and Dschmidt doesn't sell them anymore. I have also been told by an mechanic (very experienced with car wiring and electrical setups) that in order to keep one of my wires from frying out, I need to run a direct wire from the battery to the DC-DC converter and use it only for the power supply, which has been done bypassing the ignition +12 wire.

I know these are previous topics, but I haven't been able to find any that apply to my setup.

I will post pictures soon, but if you guys have any suggestions about the shutdown controller, or the boot time I would REALLY appreciate it. I am booting to the windows explorer shell and can't change it because of some software setup w/ winamp and pcanywhere.

Thanks in advance!
SuperAJ

Try using Windows ME for a faster boot time because it doesn't have to load from DOS.

Shutdown controller: http://home.attbi.com/~zootjeff/shutdown/

Quote:

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Originally posted by LW 317537:
<STRONG>Try using Windows ME for a faster boot time because it doesn't have to load from DOS.</STRONG>

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thats is not true at all. ME still has a DOS base, like its predecesors win98/95. There are hacks on the internet allowing you to re-enable DOS support if you need it. Crippled DOS support I think was an idea with ME to get 95/98 users used to the fact that newer OS's like W2K and XP will not have a full DOS support, instead using "command prompt".

not saying that ME will not be faster/slower than 98/95 but this will not be the reason either way....

for boot times, try 98lite, removes the bloat. and put your startup application for your system in as the shell. (covered here before)

I would suggest 98Lite to increase the windows boot times. Also remove any fonts that your system isn't using will also save you substantial boot time, as your system must load all the fonts during bootup.

As well as putting your application as the shell, you should fine less bootup time

I use ME because of hibernate. I have the power button set to hibernate, and enabled "ON after AC Loss" in bios.

Basically this means that when I turn on my inverter, the computer comes out of hibernate and when I push the power button briefly it goes into hibernate, then I cut the inverter.

If you are really concerned with ultra-fast boot times, get a second battery and leave the computer on all the time, or set the power button to send the computer into standby. I will probably be doing this sometime in the next year or so.

Quote:

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Originally posted by wizardPC:
<STRONG>I use ME because of hibernate. I have the power button set to hibernate, and enabled "ON after AC Loss" in bios.</STRONG>

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does booting from hibernate make much of a difference?

Booting from hibernate is alot faster. I think it stores the ram onto the HD and then writes it back into memory when it's loading.

I use windows XP and with my coming shutdown controller the computer will shutdown when the shutdown controller is activated cause the option in the power settigns is set to turn off when I push power button.

Hibernate isn't good for LCD's though, most programs need to be restarted in this case. So cold booting is reccomended.

Quote:

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Originally posted by SuperAJ:
<STRONG>takes like 45secs-1min to completely boot. Although that doesn't sound like a lot, it drags on and on when you're in the car wanting to listen to some music.</STRONG>

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What? Anything more than 15 seconds sounds like a lot to me.

Anyhow, WinME's Hibernate feature is, indeed, the same as "Suspend to Disk" -- it dumps the contents of RAM to the hard drive when you tell it to hibernate, and then when you turn it on again, rather than loading everything again, it just loads the dumped data back into RAM and you're running exactly where you left off relatively quickly. Apparently a few laptops had this feature for several years before WinME came around. I assume WinXP has it, but I haven't used it enough to know. And, of course, here's a patch available for Linux called "software suspend" that does the same thing.

However, as other threads have mentioned, the biggest problem you may have with booting is POST time. POST time is the time it takes for BIOS to probe and/or initialize all of your hardware before the OS starts to load. My POST time is a very nasty 20-25 seconds. Sadly, beyond changing a few BIOS settings and/or upgrading your BIOS, there's little you can do about POST time. If only the LinuxBIOS project had support for more mobos, we could all have 3 second boot times even without Hibernate/Software Suspend/Suspend-to-Disk.

SuperAJ - I had my Shuttle booting in 25 seconds with Win98. That is with it connection to my home network too.

I now installed Xp because of other problems and its a lot slower. 35 seconds I think. i think I can tweak it a little, and then once I get it into my truck to disable network it should be faster yet.

Nathan

ohh, I have a 900 VIA C3, 256MB ram, 40 GB WD

To speed up your boot speed,
-remove any unneeded fonts
-use 'msconfig' to remove any unneeded startup programs
-in your bios disable memory checks
-also disable booting from cd cdrives and floppys they change it back when you need to