From: wallich@ncd.com (Ken Wallich)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.laptops
Subject: Re: Powerbook 100 bad deal?
Date: 3 Sep 92 23:54:29 GMT
Reply-To: wallich@ncd.com (Ken Wallich)

ematias@dgp.toronto.edu (Edgar Matias) writes:


>In article <tron-010992162939@kip-35.apple.com>
>tron@apple.com (Tantek Celik) writes:
>>
>>As far as I know, on the
>>140,145,170 the RAM disk goes bye-bye when you shut them down.  

Righty right.  They become history.

>>I get
>>around this problem on my 170 by simply never shutting down; I just put it
>>into "Sleep" mode because waking up is much faster than booting up.  Not to
>>mention that going to sleep is faster than shutting down because you don't
>>need to close documents and quit applications.

>Is this a "safe" thing to do?  Someone (forget who exactly) told me that
>it is not safe to move a PB while it is in Sleep mode, because the hard
>drive head doesn't get parked.

It is not 'safe' according to Apple.  They specifically tell you that
before you "transport" your portable you need to shut it down.  I know
more than one powerbook owner who never shut theirs down, and they
work just fine.  If I don't shut mine (an early 140) down before
moving it (mine is "transported" on a motorcycle, aka vibration city),
then when I wake it up, the screen wakes, and the clock is running,
but my cursor is frozen, so I end up having to reboot anyway.  You are
free to do whatever works for you, but it isn't recommended by Apple,
if you belive their propaganda.

The shutdown-proof ram disc on the 100 is much nicer in that respect.
I've had a *lot* of problems when I booted from a ram disc on my 140.
First of all, to keep all the fonts and control panels, and apple menu
apps I usually use, I needed a 4 meg ram disc for the system files
alone.  Secondly, when the system crashed (ahh, life after the
toaster), it would often corrupt the ram disc, and you could then not
boot the machine without a recovery floppy.  You'd then have to remove
the Ram disc and reboot, because even on a shutdown/powerup, it still
tried to boot from the corrupt ram disc.  This was also occasionally a
problem if you booted from the ram disc, then shutdown, and tried to
bring it up.  Sometimes it would still try to boot from the ram disc,
even though the contents of it was just blown away.  I finally decided
it was better to live with the whine of the disc than to do all the
manual housekeeping I had to do to get this to work.

In the old (read 128K mac days), I remember having a ram disc that you
set as the startup application, and put all the files you wanted in
the ram disc in the same folder.  When you booted, it created the ram
disc, copied the files to the ram disc, and rebooted.  Spiff city.
When you wanted to boot from the ram disc, you just popped in the
floppy and booted from it, and it did the rest.  As a real live
software developer (but not for the mac), I know that that could still
be done (except you'd have to boot from a cartridge to have enough
space for the system files you needed on the ram disc :-0). If there
is something out there that does this, I haven't found it. Too bad the
cocky young software jocks can't come up with things that are more
functional, and less "they'll like what we give 'em".  <dismount
soapbox, hang head, boot CP/M machine, beat self in head with rubber
mallet 'til unconscious>.






--
Ken Wallich
wallich@ncd.com  
ken@wallich.com