[Morien]

Hi,

I haven't really been in the HTPC field for some time, as I realised an Xbox would be much more cost effective for my setup (10 yr old tv and stereo).

However, there is some progress occuring with the Xbox to put an embedded windows on it, so I came to wonder, would this be beneficial for a HTPC? I know that WinCE runs limited applications, however, I stumbled upon the site http://www.embeddingwindows.com/ which claims to have Windows 98 taking up less than 20megs and booting in less than 3 seconds from the Bios POST.

I haven't looked too much into it, however as, in the future, I likley will make a HTPC for myself, I was thinking I should bring it to people's attention (assuming it hasn't already been realised).

From what the website said, it's possible to completley hide the Windows desktop only showing applications you want shown, therefore it would make things look VERY proffessional (IMHO) if the Win98 (or WinXP) startup screen was replaced with a more HTPC looking splash screen, then myHTPC or something similar is loaded instantly and the htpc runs as usuall (however faster), with the desktop NEVER seen.


All this possible? All this thought about? All this done?


Morien

 

[Salmoneous]

I think a lot of these "solutions" are solving problems that can be done more easily with a stock WinXP install. Just use the suppend to RAM and you can stay within your HTPC program and never see a boot screen or Windows desktop unless you want to.

 

[Bighitter]

The newer version of Windows XP embedded would be a great alternative but then again it wont be publicly released for a while. Configure XP to auto login and do some tweaking and the bootup is very quick.

 

[Nefarious]

Salmoneous,


Can you expand on what you mean by "suspend to RAM" please?


Thanks!

 

[RayL Jr.]

As quoted from Google search "With this function, you can resume your original work directly from RAM without going through the Windows booting process and run your application again. Suspend to RAM saves your current work in the system memory, it is faster than Suspend to Hard Drive but requires power supplied to RAM, while Suspend to Hard Drive requires no power."


Embedded Windows is more (or as stated exclusively) for commercial apps.


What's really exciting is Intel Azailia audio, PCI Express, DDR-II RAM (Quad Pumped Bus), Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), new mobos and CPUs, Wi-Fi... coming out March 29th.


Check it out:

New Intel chipsets revealed for March 29, 2004...

Serial Attached SCSI Technology (SAS)

 

[Blight]

Suspend to ram (or Hybernation) can be slower than a full boot as it writes your entire ram image to disk. If you have a lof of ram, this can take longer than a standard boot.

 

[Trick414]

Oh, damn, but I think I'm going to contradict Blight here... (I don't mean that in a bad way, I think we all know how good Blight is and I say this with all due respect...)


Suspend to Ram is different than Suspend to Disk. I think Suspend to Ram (rather than Disk) is what Blight was trying to say... maybe he got them backward???


At least on my machine, Suspend to Ram (and the "boot" when I turn it back on) takes just a few seconds.


STR apparently supplies some small amount of voltage to the MB to keep the information in memory. However, the fans and whatnot turn off, so for all intents it is "off". I change the BIOS in my machines to S3 from S1. S3 is apparently the Suspend to Ram option, at least on VIA motherboards.