I wrote: ". . . whether the RAM saves its content or not, during startup it is entirely rewritten anyway. In fact, this is exactly what happens during recovery from sleep or hibernation: the RAM contents are loaded from the disk. This takes practically no time."
It is the same process as a virtual memory overlay, which computers have been doing since the 1950s. RAM contents are swapped in and out to disk with no checking or program setup. This works fine . . . except when it doesn't. I do not know how much the overlay technique is used nowadays in Windows. Back when computers had 64 kB of RAM the contents was constantly being written out to disk and then read back in somewhat less often. (That is, it was written out into never-never-land and lost forever). Even when it worked right it caused "thrashing." One of the first IBM commercial computers from the 1950s had no RAM. All data was stored on a rotating cylinder, the grand-daddy hard disk. It was all virtual, you might say. - Jed
