Widescreen Gaming Forum

Why wait for a boot up if you don't have to!

On my ECS Kn1 board using the [S3(STR)] option for the "ACPI Suspend Type" when the system suspends, it completely shuts off, except for supplying juice to the ram. When i press the power button again on the case, it takes about 4-8 seconds to get back to the desktop with everything FULLY ready. It seems to only take 8 seconds if i immediately power back on after suspending, but if its been awhile, like if i wait for a few seconds or the next day it takes only 4-6 seconds. You can tweak it further if you go into Power Options in the Control Panel, select the Advanced tab and uncheck the box for "Prompt for password when the computer returns from stand by".

At first i was only curious about it because i assumed general system performance would degrade after a few hours or days of use with the same boot. A good "old"(?) reboot seems to fix all kinds of odd problems as well as freeing ram, so at first i wasn't all that excited. That is until i played Dark Messiah 3 times through in a row, over the course of about 15 days using the sleep function with no noticeable (to me) degrading in system performance what-so-ever! The HDD is hardly used when resuming for an added bonus.

This is a first for me so i'm really clueless about why i've only just noticed this, whether is because of the motherboard, or whether im just ignorant because i've never played with the ACPI Suspend Type setting before. But if you'd like your desktop to show up, ready to go, by the time you've gotten yourself comfortable in your chair, give this a shot.

Have fun,

I L I KE I T :!:

Do you need a special motherboard to get this function rockin? I think it is a great way to save energy vs saving time. I'm sick of turning my PC off then rebooting it after a day, or leaving it on all night because I thought I was going to get back to it.

Yes, I am a big fan of this one.

I L I KE I T :!:

Do you need a special motherboard to get this function rockin?.

Thats what im wondering. Try checking your bios under Power Management(make sure you don't need to scroll down). I checked my MB manual and its description of the S3 option reflects what im seeing. I have no other MB or manual to check. Im off for dinner, ill be back shortly, i hope you all love this as much as i do.

What are you having for dinner?

lol, im going to my local Whole Foods, which is a contemporany grocery store that sells organics and healthier alternative brands and they have a "food bar". I had an assortment of greens, curry and a slice of pizza. :lol:

Did you try it yet?

Mmmmm curry, greens, pizza mmmmmmm.

Negative, I am work, I have to earn a living so I can eat those things above. mmmmmmmmmm.

I will try this some time at home.

One other thing of note. When you log back on from Stand by, XP loads up the user selection screen first and requires you to select yourself, even if your a single user :roll: . I spent the last couple night trying to figure out how to disable this extra work because i have a feeling it adds a second or more to the resume process, although im not 100% sure. Its just that im seeing the desktop photo flash across the screen just a few seconds after i press power on, then a few seconds goes by and the user selection screen pops up.

If you disable the user selection option, Xp will force a password protection window to pop up which may or may not also affect resume times. Im still trying to figure out how to bypass both of these requirements because im just a single user with no need for a password.

Get TweakUI from Microsoft XP's Powertoys; using that, there is a setting called Logon. Inside that setting is a sub-setting called Autologon; you can set that to your account, and it should bypass the logon screen all together.

Nice find on the Suspend stuff; I always ignored it as I thought it was designed for laptops.

Hibernation rocks, I use it all the time on my Mac Pro. :rockout
Currently I'm running a boot for about a month or so. :P

I recommend it to everybody if it's available to your system.

Evil: I gave TweakUI a try, but i only works for the normal boot. In fact i think i've tried doing that before directly using "control userpasswords2" from "Run". Nice program though, thanks.

Im going to keep looking for an answer, and if anyone else wants to troubleshoot, i won't stop ya :D I'll post if and when i find an answer. I also noticed that you just have to press enter for both the user-selection "welcome" screen and the alternative password protection screen, so its not a horribly big deal, but would be nice to solve imo.

SOLVED!!! Now its a 3 second boot!! (after you wait a sec as described above)

Ok, so its really simple. To disable the password prompt: go into control panel> power management> advanced, and then unckeck the "Prompt for password when comuter resumes from standby" and thats it for a 3 second psuedo-boot. Im running a 3800+, 1 gig ram, ECS KN1 SLI Lite and a 7950 GX2. So a faster system might bring better results i can only assume.

3 seconds people! lol :lol: :shock: :)

I've edited the original post.

So far only a Mac user has confirmed that insta-boots work this way. :lol: Would someone with a Windows computer chime in to confirm/deny whether this works on more than one motherboard?

I'll give it a go now because i have nothing better to do.

Gimme 5mins, i've got a Neo4 mobo btw.

OK, I'm impressed. Works a charm.

I changed in my BIOS to the [S3(STR)] option for the "ACPI Suspend Type" like you said.

Then in Windows i changed the function of my power button to "standby" instead of what it was currently on "Power Off". Now Windows says "Preparing for Standby" or whatever on the logoff screen for about 3 seconds, and the PC shuts down. Hit the power button and it's on before my monitor's even warmed up.

Thumbs up from me!

Edit: I can't understand why this isn't default?! :shock:

This kind of stuff isn't on by default because it would make stupid people's heads explode.

Well, at least i didn't put WOW!! in my title like some E-sellers. :lol:

Green Flannel Socks, ONLY $2 WOW!!!

I brought this up in another forum, trying to get a few people that shut their PCs down at night to try it out. Mine stays running 24/7 for various reasons, so it doesn't do me much good :)

With the suspend thing in bios are you talking about 4-8 second boots from a cold boot (windows shut down) or a warm boot (stand by / hibernate

Returning from Stand-by, but the setting makes it so your computer shuts all the way off except for electricity sustaining your ram. Its very useful for me and it hardly uses your HDD, and all your programs are as you left them of course.

Why they don't have a cold boot instant-boot i don't know and its frustrating for me to think about sometimes, i can imagine 3 separate ways to do it cheaply with hardware built into the system. Like with a 150Mb (give or take) re-writable ROM chip (like your bios) holding your basic initial Windows load transferred to ram at start-up. Then have windows maintain an on going dynamic start up page file so thats ready to go too. Changes to your start-up cache could be made at any time...

This could be added with a module on a video/sound/add-on card as well.

Why!?!?!

Why do they have to integrate programs into XP! Why cant they just have autonomous, perpetual single folder program installations!!!

...but i digress....

I tried this the other day and was very impressed. I don't have much cause to do this as I don't mind waiting about, I only really turn the PC on once a day and then I may boot into Linux instead.

One thing to note is that when you bring it out of stand-by anything that is set in the bios (more specifically fan control) doesn't kick in. I havent really looked into it but all my fans are running at 100% from stand-by.

Great little tip though and as said above games stay loaded! :lol:

One member on another forum stated that his overclocking settings were not retained when using standyby as well. What model of motherboard are you using? Anyone elses BIOS not retaining its settings when using the standy function? Thats 2 cases so far.