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Faster Boot Times By Reducing 'Suspend' Latency?
Miles asks: "I'm planning to building a car MP3/DVD/Navigation/RealTimeAutomobileDiagnostic System. I've decided to use Windows95/98/ME as the OS, for the software I want to run. I've seen similar car computers that take 30 seconds or more to boot, however I want to get the boot time down to 10 seconds. I plan to use "suspend to disk" instead of just powering off the computer to achieve this and it'll just reload memory from the hard drive. I tried to search for HD's that have low spin-up times, but high transfer rates, and have come up empty. IBM's microdrive has a 0.5s spin up time, but only reads at 4MB/s. Another option is flash memory that simulates an IDE drive, but the maximum transfer rate I've seen is 8MB/s. Larger drives can read at 50MB/s, but take 8 seconds to spin up.
Does anyone know of a storage medium that can be written to everytime the computer is shut off, and started up and read from in under 10 seconds (the less the better)?"
"Capacity is not an issue (as long as it is 64MB or more), because I'll have a separate conventional drive to store data. If there are better options than using suspend-to-disk, please tell me about them."
I'm afraid you might be out of luck on this one.
The problem is, Win9X simply cannot handle long uptimes, and while sleep mode doesn't render the system any more unstable, all that time you're running the OS will.
You'll get more mileage (no pun intended) out of NT. It does still have to be rebooted in a regular basis, but because cars don't typically run continuously for weeks as a time, you can go for far longer than the typical NT installation.
Your best bet would be to find something more stable that supported suspend-to-disk. The only problem is, I don't know of anything that can do that. Linux is more stable by a long shot, but last I checked you couldn't suspend to disk. MacOS can be made to do suspend-to-disk, but is certainly not as stable as NT. People have successfully made car-based MP3 players based on both Linux and MacOS (never heard of a Windows-based one but I don't doubt they exist). But you're really doing something different here with the suspend-to-disk feature; I like the idea (lower audio "warm-up" times are a Very Good Thing) but I'm not sure how it can feasibly be done with any of these three OS'es. You're going to have to look further afield.
But if you can get something running, be sure to post about it here; I like this idea.
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How about a CF card that (or EEPROM??) that contains enough to get the session started while the other media spins up? The "state" would be maintained on the instant-on media. There might be a small delay to complete functionality but it will appear to be instant on (which is the real need, I my opinion).
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I've been wanting to do the same thing with an old P120 around my house and a couple old HD's.
The only thing that has held me back (well I'm also broke) is the thought that everytime you hit a pot-hole, your going to tear your disk to shreds. I've been thinking of a way around this, such as suspending it by springs from the roof of the trunk, or pacckaging it in bubble wrap, but it still seems like it would get quite a jarring.
Also what about heat, it doesn't seem like an already old PC would last very long in a hot car and/or trunk, what would be the solution? Just use a lot of fans?