> I felt constrained with 3.2G. My new Thinkpad has 10G. Next thing to > do is to buy more RAM (I have 64M but can expand to 288M). > The hard drive on my new one has a 50% higher transfer rate, so I can > have 50% more RAM and keep the same hibernation times. Before I had 96M > and hibernation times were just bearable. Now I can do 128M with ease, > or go to 192M and be more patient.
> The latest Thinkpads can now handle more than 512M. Mine is only 3 > weeks old and it's behind the times already! Well, by the way, the advantage of the kernel hibenration feature is that it only dumps the *used* part of physical memory, not all of it, and moreoever, it swap outs by usual kernel means the more memory it can before attempting to suspend. That is, the data dumped by the hibernation code is the small part of physical memory that cannot be cleaned. Needless say, of course, that in most cases the dump is really fast. I have a 96Mb desktop system that, in usual situations (the GIMP running with several netowrk apps, a big X server and GV) dumps only 30-40Mb on software suspend. And of course, on resume it only restores the dumped memory, and keeps the swapped-out pages on the disk. Thus the computer can be used before all pages are back into physical memory (and for most desktop apps, needless to say, again, that working with some disk access in the background from times to times gives no trouble). Cheers, Raph PS: this "hdparm -u1" trick on your hard disk, when it is supported, is really neat. Even out of hibernation consideration, it improves responsiveness a lot (good example where you can feel the improvement: the dayly update of file location databases)
