Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Common Interests Instant-On Desktops Possible?

I have been wondering for a while now, why can't someone (Microsoft, Apple, anybody?) make an "Instant-On" PC? What would be so hard about it? Instead of having to boot up, loading everything into memory from a hard drive, why not have the OS loaded on flash memory? It works with handhelds, i.e. PocketPC and Palm, why not scale it up? Memory is cheap enough now. And I guarantee the size of the OS would go down.

Just a thought. Anybody got any ideas?

Yep. It all depends on the operating system though. You can get a solid state hard drive for just the OS and swap file. Then, put your programs, etc, and a regular hard drive.

Or, you can get an ACPI motherboard, and load the proper ACPI drivers for your OS, and turn it on and off with the power switch. It takes about 5 seconds for it to come back up. It takes all the stuff in RAM, and puts it on the hard drive. Once you power it back up, it takes that info on the hard drive and puts it back into RAM like it was always there.

I have built a few computers with WindowsME that do that. It's great for kids that don't know how to properly shut down the system.

So why hasn't this made it into the mainstream? If the OS was designed from the get-go (i.e. PocketPC) for Instant-On applications, it would solve a huge amount of PC problems.

a lot of the trouble (lack of speed) is in the bios of the machine.
then windows takes it's sweet time and waits on a lot of stuff while it's booting. (like getting an IP for instance).

one thing you can do is put the machine into S4 or "suspend mode" it's actually still running but using almost no power. then when you hit the switch or move the mouse (depending on how you set it up) it'll come on almost instantly. this is enabled in windows98 and above i believe. and it will "work" now. of course your hardware has to support it as well.
device states are all saved in memory.

anyway, there are big hurtles to overcome before real performance desktops or workstations can be "instant on".

i forget where the site is, but people have shown that a hacked bios (openbios.org?) can POST and do all it's other crap in a few ms on current hardware. This was required to allow for 99.9% uptime. now it's up to the OS vendors to fix up their load times, etc.

just my 3? cents
-eric

It's already here. It's called STR- Suspend To Ram, and I have it working on my machine (first time I ever got a power management scheme to work as it should, I might add). Win XP is a good thing.

Not really what I am wanting, but it may have to do. Hightower's ideas where good too. Thanks guys, I was just wondering if any research has gone into this topic.

I think it is what you want, though. My computer powers itself down after about 10 minutes of non-activity. This means that nothing is running- no fans, CPU, nada.... the only active line is the +5V standby that is keeping the data in the RAM alive. Then, when I push the power button, there is a long beep and I am back at the login screen (you can configure it to go back to the last user if you want) in about 10 seconds.

But if you cut power, then you loose everything, right? Your computer isn't truely "OFF". And you have to boot first before you can put your machine in STR mode.

I am talking about a theoretical computer that has everything on flash (or ROM, etc) memory (except maybe large storage). So, just like on a PocketPC, you hit the power button, and POOF the computer is ready to go. No booting. Programs that run on startup, like AntiVirus, will be in flash also.

I see what you are saying Sandman333, and it sounds cool. I will have to check it out.

Yes, if you lose power, you lose everything. In order to do what you want, you would need solid state memory, not hard drives. From what I understand, that may not be too far away for home PCs.

Hitachi made an instant on PC (boot time was ~3 seconds).
OS was hard coded so there was no loading to memory.
Problems were; couldn't upgrade OS or any hardware on the computer without a swap of the OS code (doesn't this sound kind of like MS?).
Couldn't load drivers for new HW.
Couldn't add memory, change BIOS, change HDD, etc.
OS was coded specifilcy for the HW as shipped.
It was really fast, but nobody like the our way and nothing else approach. (Seems like MS is getting people closer and closer to it though.)