Using suspend mode

tenfoot · 10-19-1999, 03:18 PM

How much power does a PC use in suspend mode
i.e would it be feasible to leave it booted
up, but suspended so that it comes on instantly when you get in the car?

mda · 10-20-1999, 07:03 AM

First you need ATX hardware...

Then it depends on the hardware, but it can be as low as 9% of the normal usage.

The problem is that is's not very good, much hardware has real trouble waking up from suspend...

And don't forget the inverter will still use a lot of juice (if you use one).

Try it though and give us a report!

jjohnson · 10-21-1999, 08:11 PM

Or even better - if you could get suspend-to-disk working, the boot time would be only a few seconds... Many laptops do this when the battery drops too low as a safety measure. It basically writes the entire contents of RAM and the CPU state to a file and then shuts down. When it boots up it sees the file and restores the RAM contents and CPU state. Boot-up time would be a fraction of a normal boot process. The only thing that concerns me is the initialization of peripherals... I don't know how well it handles that.

--Jason
http://jump.to/m2pc

Alien8 · 10-21-1999, 08:17 PM

I got the suspend2disk to work
the major down side is the fact that every time you start up, the ram image is cleared. Which means that you have to fully shutdown/suspend to disk when you power down.

Thats possible with one of those shutdown controllers, but my idea was to have one static ram image file and always use the same one to boot with, and as I am typing this I just had a killer idea of changing the file to read only.

the only other factor that was an issue for my box only was that I only have 16mb ram and it would take like 30s to re-load the image.

Alien8 · 10-21-1999, 08:21 PM

I forgot to mention, even though my Aopen ap5t AT motherboard was the first socket 7 rev motherboard to support this feature it doesn't work.

It does however work on my Aopen ax6b ATX pII motherboard.