Thread: Reducing Return From Hibernation Time......

hibernation consists of reading a giant file and dumping into memory. to decrease time, get a faster harddrive to transfer the giant file faster (7200rpm). to decrease time, make the file smaller by using less ram (256mb).

Originally Posted by psyrex

hibernation consists of reading a giant file and dumping into memory. to decrease time, get a faster harddrive to transfer the giant file faster (7200rpm). to decrease time, make the file smaller by using less ram (256mb).

Well the hard drive will stay were it is. But as far as memory is concerned, how do I reduce the amount of memory? When I looked under the power management section of Control Panel, I did not see anything about adjusting memory size. Are you saying I need to remove physical memory from my CarPC (i.e. take it out of the CarPC)?

yes, physically replace it with a smaller one. hibernation creates a 512MB file that is a direct copy of whats in your memory at the time of hibernation. This 512MB file will take a while to read and dump back into your memory when you're recovering.

Switch to 256MB, and it only creates a 256MB file. Recovering then is much faster cuz you're only dumping half as much data back into memory.


as to how much it reduces your startup time, that's up to your setup. You probably should watch your bootup with a stopwatch and note how long the recover part takes. if the recover is only 5 seconds, swapping to smaller memory will not get you to the 10-15seconds that you want.

Also, what are you measuring from? you said it's between when you turn your key and when it's up, but their 10-15 might just be their POST+recover time. On my setup, there's nearly a 10 second delay between ignition and carpc startup.

Originally Posted by psyrex

Also, what are you measuring from? you said it's between when you turn your key and when it's up, but their 10-15 might just be their POST+recover time. On my setup, there's nearly a 10 second delay between ignition and carpc startup.

From the time I turn the key to the "ON" position until the desktop comes up is what I measured. Also when I timed how long it takes to boot from scratch it was 45-50 seconds. So is 35 secs pretty good, average, slow? Is ther some type of software "gadget" out there that can help speed this up?

Google for 'Bootvis'. It's a program developed by microsoft sepecifically to optimise your starup.

When you install it and open it up, tick all the boxes on the left side, then click click trace which gives you a few option, to shutown + trace, standby + trace and hibernate + trace. Choose either depending on what you're trying to improve. If you want both, just do one first, then do the other one later on.

Anyway you click one of them and then click ok in the box that comes up.
It then basically restarts/standybys/hibernates your pc and boots up again timing how long everything takes. Bios, drivers etc, windows shell. You can then goto trace > optimise system and it will make some changes to optimise your boot up times.

Look at the graphs before and after optimisation to find out how much of a difference it makes. It's always been a couple of seconds on systems i've used it on.

Originally Posted by NiSlo

Google for 'Bootvis'. It's a program developed by microsoft sepecifically to optimise your starup.

When you install it and open it up, tick all the boxes on the left side, then click click trace which gives you a few option, to shutown + trace, standby + trace and hibernate + trace. Choose either depending on what you're trying to improve. If you want both, just do one first, then do the other one later on.

Anyway you click one of them and then click ok in the box that comes up.
It then basically restarts/standybys/hibernates your pc and boots up again timing how long everything takes. Bios, drivers etc, windows shell. You can then goto trace > optimise system and it will make some changes to optimise your boot up times.

Look at the graphs before and after optimisation to find out how much of a difference it makes. It's always been a couple of seconds on systems i've used it on.

Thanks, I will give it a try. But based on your experience, do you think there is anything left (i.e. can I realistically get the time down)? What are typical hibernation times?

It can't hurt, it lays out all the startup programs in optimal order (basically defrags your startup progs). That alone speeds things up. Plus it's a good tool to identify what it taking the most time. If you can see that the shell or a specific driver is taking along time to load, you can move in it and try to reduce that specific item.

I don't use hibernation. I cold boot each time and I manage to get cold boots of about 30 seconds or so. I may look at changing this down the track however

Its an intresting thread this and one I'm going to follow... one point that I think is missed by Bootvis is the BIOS ( I could be wrong ) and options like quick boot can help.

One example where I have just extended my boot time is by putting a vid card in - now it does some BIOS resource check which I've not managed to turn off giving it around an extra 3-4 secs boot cold or hibernate.

Mines a Via 12000 so that may be some thing to watch for your self JM

Terran

There is a way to use less memory in WinXP without removing the physical memory.

It is in BOOT.INI using /maxmem - tell winXP how much physical memory it can use.

read more: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sys...n/bootini.mspx