[Thinkpad] Windows XP on 380XD (Paul A. Pennington) Thinkpad

[Michael Geary]

> > This is purely a guess, but is it possible you don't have 
> > enough RAM to put XP into standby?
> > 
> > Standby uses volatile RAM as storage, and 96mb may
> > not be enough - and I'm not sure that XP will use
> > virtual memory for standby.

> Um, no, that's not how standby works. It doesn't copy data 
> from some other place into memory. It doesn't require some 
> minimum amount of memory. It just keeps whatever is in memory 
> alive with a small amount of battery power.

Just to clarify and correct that a bit, the process of going into standby
does use some memory. Before suspending the machine, Windows broadcasts a
message to notify applications and device drivers of the impending standby.
This may include applications that are running but have been paged out of
memory because they haven't been used recently. Even for an application that
is in active use, the section of its code that handles the standby message
may not be in RAM.

This is why you often see a flurry of disk activity when putting a machine
into standby - it's the application code paging in as the messages are sent
to all the apps, along with any disk activity the apps do in response to the
standby message (e.g. saving something in memory to disk).

This will naturally be slower with less memory because there's more paging
needed, but if Windows runs OK otherwise, then there's no reason for this
pre-standby process to have any problems.

Of course this is all moot if there's no power management driver to begin
with.

-Mike