boot times and software suspend (Was: Re: [plug] Distro Day !!!)

[Craig Ringer]

> | Aha. Those things have an onboard Promise ATA/100 controller to 
> | suppliment the ATA/66 onboard the via chipset. If you're not using the 
> | ATA/100 ports, turn the loading of the Promise BIOS off in your main 
> | BIOS and your machine will POST considerably faster.
> 
> Hmm... Mine has onboard ATA/100 but no onboard ATA/66.  It has 5 IDE
> devices, with two on an offboard ATA/133 card - which does contribute
> ~10s to the boot time.  It still takes bloody ages between pushing the
> power button and the screen coming on though.

A7V133 you said? Odd....  I had an A7V and it had the Promise 
controller, and my housemate's A7V133 also had a promise controller but 
that one had "RAID" (allegedly). Perhaps I'm muddled.

Anyway, POST times should be improving on new hardware - one of the few 
things we do have to thank MS for. They had a screaming fit at the 
hardware vendors during their "make winxp boot fast" project, and 
managed to get most of them to agree to some improvements in the POST 
process to make it a /lot/ faster generally.

Craig Ringer