I've been using 2000 on my old laptop that I used for the SMT6/ODBII scanner.

 

I didn't even think about that. I have a windows 2000 professional CD around the house somewhere. That may be the way to go.

Thank you supercow. That's probly why... I have 512m of memory.

 

Supercow has it mostly right, but if you are worried about boot time, just pick up an 8gb to 16gb flash drive and install Linux on that.
Since a flash drive is solid state it doesn't take long to read/write. This provides lightning fast boot times.

It is by far the best system to use. I wouldn't suggest going anything smaller than an 8 gig drive, though. The entire drive would need to contain critical Operating System files and drivers, while also being capable of holding an entire dump of the RAM(for hibernate) and Virtual Memory('swap' partition in linux).

I use a similar system for a firewall at home, which sits in hibernate until a packet hits it's NIC, then it will Wake-On-Lan, which takes about 20 seconds with SSD. if not less.

DTN, if you need any help I'm like a couple miles away.

 

lol. I actually moved away like a year ago. I just never updated my profile. Would have been nice to meet. I'm going to update my profile. The problem is not in the speed of storage, it's in the speed and size of volitile memory access.

BTW. Solid state drives are generally much slower then magnetic drives.

for instance, newer SATA drives can handle up to 6GBps while USB 3 is 3GBps.

 

solid state slower than hard drives? false statement.

yes, some usb and cf cards(not all) will be slower than hard drives, but pretty much all 2.5" ssd drives now shit all over even the wd velociraptors in nearly every category.

don't make blanket statements, it creates bad information.

anywho, install windows 2000 and use hibernation, not sleep. sleep still drains some battery power, and if it's off for a while there is a chance it drains your battery. hibernation will take a little longer to start up and shut down and take up a gig or so, but completely shuts off the computer and drains 0 power.

i don't understand why you think it matters if it's off for months at a time. also, if it takes 8 minutes, something is drastically wrong and you do need to reinstall like supercow said.

 

What!! I'm 100% right all the time! computerese is my native language.

Here's the downside to your plan, ever tuned with a laptop in the car? you now have two usb cables (tuner/ob2), and a usb stick in the computer. If you knock out the usb stick and happen to be writing you could kill the os and have to run back to the house and reinstall, killing the tuning session.... would be neat to have the usb stick in hdd compartment and have usb attached to a header on the mobo.... Anyways a regular hdd still makes more sense.



Hibernation isn't any faster than clean boot though, in fact if you have software running it's going to be slower. It just allows you to resume where you left off. Sleep is good if you take it back and hook it up to the charge when your done. Most laptops only last about a day or two sleeping before the battery is dead.

I tell people, sleep it if your moving across the room, hibernate if you moving across town. Except in this senario since I'm assuming he'll be plugging it in when he gets back from tuning!



tru dat

 

i mean, with my limited hardware for my carpc, the pc comes out of hibernation and is usable in around 25 seconds. for a cold boot, it's closer to a minute. that's close to a third of the time it takes to fully boot, which in his case down to 5 minutes from 15 minutes would feel quite a lot more quicker.

yes, i know it doesn't work like that. but if he already has windows on, why not try it. also, if you are just using this thing just for tuning, why the hell are you installing windows updates? do this:

1. fresh os install
2. software and drivers you NEED, NOTHING else
3. disable windows update
4. run msconfig, and disable anything in the startup tab you don't need to startup with windows (google/adobe updaters, blah...)
5. defrag disk
6. enable a quick boot type option in your bios if you have it
7. disable all those visual effects in the system/performance tab or whatever
8. try with and without hibernation

if you can't get a boot under 2 minutes then not only are you not trying hard enough, you're actively slowing it down.

 

Tibby01: I said generally flash drives are slower. When you say Flash Drive you're talking about USB. 90% of Flash drives are usb 1 or 2, very few are usb 3 yet. SATA 1 is faster then USB 2. Sata 2 is the same as usb 3. When using the word Generally, it means just that. Generally. Also, if I'm not spending $45 to upgrade the RAM I'm not spending $200 on a solid state hard disk. This is an old shitty laptop that I use for OBD2 I'm not spending any money on it. It works.

The problem with the laptop is that it's only running 512 megs of memory, which was fine for XP SP1 and SP2, but SP3 killed it.

I've found that windows applications, when left running, tend to act funny after hibernation for a period of time. Especially ProScan, it never wants to act right after hibernation, and it takes longer to start the longer it was off.





Microsoft keeps turning on auto updates

 

humm.. never really noticed much difference on my laptop. You are copying the exact same amount of information from the harddrive to the memory except out of hibernation you should be copying more with programs open. Must be a factor of a slower processor on the car pc or something.

ah ha! - http://www.rohos.com/using-win-hibernation.htm


I've only bothered to use hibernate on my laptop and it's a pretty quick laptop. Looks like the only difference is in windows quick check for new hardware and such. I'd venture to guess that on a quick pc this isn't more than a few seconds. If you've got several hundred mb of programs running it could easily take longer than that to come back from hibernate.

 

look dtn, you said solid state drives(not flash) = ssd = the current nomenclature pertaining to the market of 2.5" solid state drives, which are in no way generally or at all slower than hard drives.

i'm sure whoever brought it up above was talking about cf cards, as that is what is usually used to boot off of when talking about a windows os. and they are almost always faster. don't believe me, check the countless threads detailing it on mp3car.

if it's an old shitty laptop i doubt it has even sata 1, which makes his suggestion valid. it may have means to boot off of a flash card though, and if it does, it would probably be faster than it would from a hard drive(albeit a good amount of work to get going properly and to minimize writes, but since you were talking about emulating some kind of windows environment in linux, you obviously don't mind).

disable the update service through msconfig. it would take two seconds to learn how with a google. also, it's impossible to have something behaving differently based on how long it's been in hibernation. it's written to disk.

my numbers are with a via 1ghz processor and 512mb ram, nothing else.