The Nerdbook – Part 3: Waking up the X121e (measurements)

So, here’s a few measurements to show you how this X121e gets up from the various suspended modes (more specifically: S3 aka standby aka suspend to RAM, S4 aka hibernate aka suspend to disk). For details on these measurements, read on below on the configuration and how the tests were done.

Standby to logon prompt: 4s

Standby to surf-ready: 9s

Hibernate to logon prompt: 15s

Hibernate to surf-ready: 19s

To me, that looks fairly ok for all of these typical netbook applications, but ymmv.

Note that if you don’t know what computer I’m talking about, read Part 1 and Part 2 of “The Nerdbook”.

System Configuration

The OS used for all tests was Windows XP Professional (32bit) w/ SP3. The system was installed according to typical best practises – a good guide is TweakHound’s XP Tweaking Guide. Acoording to this guide, the “Level 2” setup was used (which is slightly optimized), but all spiffy optics were turned off (aka W2K appearance). Classic login prompts are used both for standby and hibernate. All of the ThinkVantage software utilities were installed and active. “InstantResume” was not activated (i.e. the system needs to negotiate the WLAN connection when resuming from standby).

The system has a configuration with a GRUB2 boot manager in the MBR and the XP boot loader in the XP partition. The XP boot loader was set to 0s timeout; the GRUB2 has a 5s timeout (which will be subtracted from the relevant hibernate measurements).

Relevant hardware is the standard 320GB HDD and 4GB of RAM.

Measurements

For all measurements, a standard stop watch was used. For that reason, there is some tolerance on behalf of the stopwatch operator. I assume these to be below +/-0.25s.

For the standby measurements, the system was configured to wake on a press of the power button. The power button was pressed and the stop watch started. The stop watch was stopped when the logon prompt appeared – this is the “standby to logon prompt” measurement.

Then the credentials were entered. Upon pressing enter, the stopwatch was started. When the baloon announcing the available WLAN connection appeared, the stopwatch was stopped again. The total reading from both measurements then is the “standby to surf-ready” measurement.

For the hibernate measurements, the system was configured to wake on a press of the power button. The power button was pressed and the stop watch started. I waited through GRUB2’s five-second-timeout (see above). The stop watch was stopped when the logon appeared. Five seconds were subtracted for the GRUB2 timeout, the result is the “hibernate to logon prompt” measurement.

Then the credentials were entered. Upon pressing enter, the stopwatch was started. When the baloon announcing the available WLAN connection appeared, the stopwatch was stopped again. The total reading from both measurements with the five seconds subtracted then is the “hibernate to surf-ready” measurement.