We have a bit of test gear we've developed that's based around a single board PC running Windows 2000. It presently takes around 7 minutes from power on to the app being there ready for use. The plan is to not have it boot very often and to use suspend to save power between recharges.
However, if I free up enough hard drive space to use hibernate, the machine can go from power on to ready for use in around 45 seconds. And that's using a microdrive- I gather we could increase the speed by using a compact flash card. The problem with hibernate is that the user isn't going to wait the 45 seconds needed to write the hibernate file.
How easy is it to prevent Windows deleting the hibernate file on startup? As long as we avoid powering down during a write, we can then simply kill the power when the unit isn't needed and always restore the system from the same hibernate file, with the application reloading things where necessary when it comes back up. I think 45 seconds isn't a huge length of time, and in conjunction with suspend could increase the time between charges quite a lot, since the units will only be occasionally used even though they've been signed out and someone's carrying them around.
Also, how can I change where the hibernate file is stored? The system runs from a 1 gig microdrive, but I can put an additional CF card in there to hold the hibernate file if it gives a significant speed increase. Or even a PCMCIA hard drive, if that's even faster. I have to keep the system on the microdrive, though.
-- Dr. Craig Graham, Software Engineer Advanced Analysis and Integration Limited, UK.