One of the ways to extend the rather short battery life of current-generation pen computers like the NCR 3125 is to make generous use of the low-power stand-by mode. Unfortunately, the substantial amount of time taken to go to stand-by mode and wake up from it makes this an unattractive option.
I'd like to understand why PenPoint has this problem and what can/is being done about it.
To illustrate the problem, I took some timings with our NCR 3125. The relevant numbers are how long it took to go into stand-by mode and how long it took to wake up from stand-by for both PenPoint 1.0A and DOS. For going into stand-by I measured time from press of the orange button to display off. For waking up, I measured time from press of orange button to working system. For a fair test, I made DOS wake up the disk, too, by viewing a file with DOSshell after wake up (ie. I put the system to sleep wi
th a not-previously-viewed small file selected and the file menu up, and tapped "View Contents" as soon as the screen came back). All times are in seconds.
Action PenPoint DOS
------- -------- -----
Stand-by 16 4.3
Wake 15 8
Wake without disk 3.5
Here are my questions:
1. Why does PenPoint take an extra 7 seconds to wake up over DOS?
2. What does PenPoint need to do that takes 11.7 seconds and lots of disk rattling when standing by?
3. Why does the disk have to spin at all for wake-up?
My understanding is that the 3125 retains all RAM data when in stand-by mode, so I can't understand at all why PenPoint would have to do anything, much less almost 10 seconds worth of stuff to stand-by and wake-up???
I haven't tested this on other pen computers--can someone comment on whether the ThinkPad and other units share the difficulty?
-- Rich
PS: This is a copy of a message I'm posting to CompuServe and to comp.sys.pen since there aren't clear divisions of appropriateness.
