Fast-Booting Text-Editor Operating System? 660
cgenman writes "What is the fastest booting operating system out there that is still sufficient for editing text? Quite frequently, I'll need to boot my laptop and edit a few lines of text, or jot down an idea or two. XP loads in roughly 4 minutes to usable, and Ubuntu loads in about 60 seconds. Both feel like an eternity if there isn't a pen and paper around. What is the best operating system that people have found which would load to useable in under 20 seconds, can edit text files in something a little more friendly than VI or EMACS, yet can still access fat32 formatted USB drives? GUIs aren't required, but commands which require arcane foreknowledge or a cheat sheet are out."
Not hard (Score:5, Informative)
Then compile that into your initramfs, and just don't bother to do a switch_root to a real file system. As long as you've got the hardware and filesystem drivers compiled into the kernel, life is good.
See http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ [linuxfromscratch.org] for more details.
This use-case is one where I would not recommend emacs.
Re:Not hard (Score:5, Informative)
add a slightly more robust text editor
I would recommend Nano http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nano_(text_editor) [wikipedia.org] for this purpose. It's easier to use than vim or emacs, and more familiar if you have a MS-DOS 'Edit' background. If you don't need to do any heavy duty coding, Nano is more than powerful enough.
Re:Not hard (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Not hard (Score:5, Informative)
Nano's actually decent for coding as well. You can set it up to do tab completion, code colourization, and other things one normally sees in GUI code editors.
Re:Not hard (Score:5, Funny)
Nano's actually decent for coding as well. You can set it up to do tab completion, code colourization, and other things ...
But does it have a full IDE, web-browser, calendar, IRC, spreadsheet, email, calculator, psychiatrist and canonised author?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
ALT + L (Score:3, Informative)
I'm pretty sure there is a config switch for it too, but ALT+L works for me.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not hard (Score:4, Insightful)
re: Not hard -- Use Vista (Score:5, Funny)
Whenever I run Vista my computer gets a fast boot to the main screen.
In fact, one time I kicked my monitor clear across the room, and I am generally a very calm person.
Re: Not hard -- Use Vista (Score:5, Funny)
Are you saying that you were able to alter the boot time by putting the machine in motion?
That's quite a kick you got there.
Re: Not hard -- Use Vista (Score:4, Funny)
"We've discovered... the anti-cluon."
Re:Not hard (Score:5, Funny)
This use-case is one where I would not recommend emacs.
Why not? It's a perfect solution: an operating system which can edit text, too!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Why not? It's a perfect solution: an operating system which can edit text, too!
Yeah, but he's looking for a _lightweight_ operating system.
Re:Not hard (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh come ON, it's obvious (Score:3, Informative)
If you need fancy text editing, use WordPerfect 7.
You can even find shortkey masks for standard keyboards, I still remember shift-7 prints.
Either way, Linux's boot-to-edit cannot come close to the speed of DOS. Especially with himem and emm386 disabled.
AmigaOS (Score:4, Interesting)
I belive my Amiga booted in 8 seconds before I added all the patches, tools and accessories you wanted .. If you aborted the shell before loading Workbench you would probably shave off two-three seconds more ...
Had some miniemacs with the OS, and it seems it can use fat32:
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/fat32.html [amigahistory.co.uk]
You can get USB aswell:
http://www.amigau.com/c-amiga/hardware.htm [amigau.com]
I realise it's not a viable alternative today, but it's kind of sad how bad things develop considering how much faster todays machines is.
Reminds me of a youtube video with a Mac Classic running Claris Works (or something similar) and a more modern PC running Office Word or whatever, boot systems booting up, running the word processor and then writing something (and eventually saving and turning the machine of as well.) .. And sometimes people don't need much more than that application offered.
Of course the new software is much more advanced, but the old mac did it faster
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
*sigh*
DOS is going to have difficulty meeting the requirement to support lots of modern file systems I'm afeared. (And I could be wrong, if FreeDOS has gotten a LOT better since the last time I looked.)
And WordPerfect is NOT a text editor. It's a word processor. Totally different animal. Doh.
If you can get a DOS running with the necessary file system support, try to dig up an old copy of QEdit. That old thing rocked hard.
Or Xtree. Also rocked hard. Qedit was the best single-purpose text editor, Xtree was re
Wake up (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wake up (Score:5, Interesting)
Not all motherboards run coreboot (Score:3, Interesting)
LinuxBIOS/Coreboot will get a system up in 3 seconds or less.
But requires a motherboard compatible with coreboot. Which do you recommend buying?
Re:Not all motherboards run coreboot (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Suspend to disk instead of just sleep makes the questioner's 20 second requirement and doesn't trickle away the battery if he plans to carry it around a lot while it's off. I suppose it depends on the ratio of sleep/suspend time to use time which one is better. I always use suspend to prevent the battery running out if I'm not paying attention, or when travelling if a TSA goon pulls the battery or somesuch.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not true.
It might not do it nicely for you by default, but you can configure udev rules to guarantee the mount points correctly.
Re:Wake up (Score:4, Informative)
actually, it can: run
then add a line to your fstab like
I'm not sure what the sw option is, couldn't find it in any of the expected manpages, so you may want to just use defaults instead.
Re:Wake up (Score:5, Informative)
$> man hibernate.conf
PowerdownMethod (requires UseSuspend2 on)
Allows you to choose what Software Suspend 2 should do after writing its image to disk. 3/4/5 will only work if you have ACPI enabled in your kernel. 3/4/5 correspond to the ACPI states S3 (suspend-to-RAM), S4 (suspend-to-disk), and S5 (power off). Choosing 3 will request your machine to enter the S3 Suspend-to-RAM state if it is supported - this allows you drastically cut the resume time waiting for your BIOS but still consumes power whilst hibernated (though the image is not lost should power run out). Choosing 4 will cause your machine to enter an S4 sleep state which may also reduce the resume time without using any power whilst hibernated. Choose ing 5 will cause your machine to switch off after suspending (traditional method) but might still cause your machine to resume when you open the lid. 0 bypasses ACPI and shuts off the machine completely.
Another words there is a another option that gives you instant on and protects against dead batteries on Linux. Apple computers do a version of this by default.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, it's called Safe Sleep [wikipedia.org]. In fact, that whole article (on Hibernate) is informative for all the major OSes, but it could use information on BSD (and perhaps OS/2, if that even runs on laptops?)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Another words [...]
The phrase is "in other words"...
Re:Wake up (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wake up (Score:5, Insightful)
The poster wanted to get a text editor open as fast as possible. Explaining to him that not shutting the computer down in the first place but simply putting it into a sleep mode is faster than booting is a perfectly valid and reasonable response. After all, it helps him towards his underlying goal.
To take your analogy, it's like asking for ways to increase your car's power to be able to travel between two distant cities faster, and being told that there's a maglev going every fifteen minutes. It's a perfectly valid answer.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sleep does work with Mac OS X on a MacBook. I never turn mine off, I just shut the lid. When I want to use it again, it takes a few seconds to display the screen saver password prompt.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That's a cold boot. Hibernation actually can take longer, depending on how much RAM you have and how many pages are dirty.
No, the boot time is very long after an OS install because all the boot caches have to be rebuilt. Different computers require different drivers. Mac OS X combines all
Re:Wake up (Score:4, Funny)
Anyone reading the discussion from top to bottom may wish to keep a finger on the PgDn key from here on in.
What follows is at least 4 pagefuls of shitty car metaphors.
Suspend to disk? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not in the 'spirit' of your question, but perhaps it's a better solution to your problem?
Re:Suspend to disk? (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't need a new OS, you need a new motherboard.
Asus has "Express Gate" [neoseeker.com] on their newer mobos that allow you to boot into a web-surfing, email only mini OS [zdnet.co.uk] in "less than 5 seconds" without having to worry about whether you slept, suspended or hibernated the previous tme you shut down your PC.
Ok, its basically an on-board Linix distro, so you do need a better OS after all.
toms root (Score:4, Interesting)
tomsroot http://www.toms.net/rb/ [toms.net]
DOS (Score:5, Insightful)
How about DOS?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Except that you're likely to hate the filesystem choices available.
Re:DOS (Score:4, Informative)
You can mount NTFS/ext2 in DOS using Paragon IFSDRV. There are probably drivers for other filesystems available if one looks around. A quick google reveals a long list of DOS software at www.unet.univie.ac.at [univie.ac.at].
Re:DOS (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
good idea, except that the "safe mode with command prompt" option that comes with XP boots up fully into safe mode, and the only difference is that it loads cmd.exe in a window as the shell instead of Explorer. You can actually exit out of cmd, give it a 3-finger salute, run program, and run "explorer" to get into "normal" safe mode.
XP doesn't have the underlying DOS that was there in Windows 9X. It's NT-based. Installing a multi-boot with FreeDOS might be an option, though. That was certainly my first thou
Re:DOS (Score:5, Informative)
OK, in restrospect that's funny, but I was being serious. FreeDOS meets all his requirements. It boots to command line in just a few seconds, supports FAT32, is easy to use, and there are countless thousands of high quality text editors of all flavors available for it. It even has TCP/IP support and such, and it can be booted off the oldest, smallest, most worthless thumb drive that you possibly own.
Re:DOS (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe you meant that as a joke, but you're not far off:
Kolibrios is a full, modern OS with a desktop. Written in Assembly, which as you can imagine makes in unbelievably fast. Can boot from a floppy.
I just tried it out a few days ago
http://www.kolibrios.org/ [kolibrios.org]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:DOS (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a bootable OS. This is basically all a root kit is. ... ...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Try MenuetOS then http://www.menuetos.net/ [menuetos.net] It's what Kolibri is based on. At least, Kolibri is based on the Free Software 32bit MenuetOS. The author has since switched to a 64bit version which isn't Free Software (hence Kolibri exists).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That it was written in assembly directly means that it is unbelievably fast only if the person writing the assembly can do, say, global register allocation optimization in his head...
While there are tasks for which hand-coded assembly really is faster, those are very special tasks. A complete OS is not one of them.
Re:DOS (Score:4, Informative)
FreeDOS can boot from a USB stick. I have one at the office for flashing Dell server BIOS images. It boots pretty much in the blink of an eye. Very, very fast.
Re:DOS (Score:5, Insightful)
DOS will not have any of the power management features required to operate a modern laptop. The hit to your battery life would be SEVERE
not necessarily important Re:DOS (Score:3, Insightful)
DOS will not have any of the power management features required to operate a modern laptop. The hit to your battery life would be SEVERE
Its not clear that battery life is relevant to the question. Original question did after all mention
"boot my laptop and edit a few lines of text, or jot down an idea or two"
I think even the worst possible power management should survive long enough to meet that task. If boot speed is the primary objective, then DOS should be just fine. The question did not say that the user wants to boot quickly and write a novel, after all.
pico (Score:5, Informative)
all the key commands are shown at the bottom of the screen.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
boot a GUI-less linux install and use pico/nano for text editing.
I agree. Booting my CentOS 5 servers in single-user mode take less than 20 seconds from the kernel starts to load until I can run Emacs. It's actually more like 10 seconds.
I excluded BIOS startup because it is highly variable. My home desktop passes its BIOS startup in around 10 seconds, while our HP server blades at work take almost a minute to just get to GRUB.
I recommend (Score:5, Funny)
Freedos? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, you want fast booting?
Get FreeDOS [freedos.org] and one of the text editors from here [freedos.org].
I can't think of anything that will boot faster, although EMACS will likely be the friendliest editor available.
Re:Freedos? (Score:5, Informative)
"Eeepc 2G Surf cold boot to X in 10 sec" (the video is quite impressive, even you see the results in the title):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzkQhHaFE0I [youtube.com]
Some more details:
http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=25964 [eeeuser.com]
I have no doubt that FreeDOS can do better than that, but I'm actually curious how fast is it? And is the speed so much better that it is better than 10 seconds with a GUI.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I can't think of anything that will boot faster, although EMACS will likely be the friendliest editor available.
Qedit [umich.edu]
was my favorite from that time, not for windows as The SemWare Editor [wikipedia.org].
I had the unfortunate pleasure of owning a compaq contura aero 486sx33 laptop. I got it cheap as it was even for the time period a piece of shit, but it did the job. I often times avoided booting to windows to use qedit to take down notes and such.
Probably one from Stalman (Score:5, Funny)
I'd say Stallman's first OS:
doofus@hotdog:~$ time emacs -nw
real 0m2.075s
user 0m0.372s
sys 0m0.076s
doofus@hotdog:~$
DOS. (Score:4, Interesting)
If that's not fast enough for you, a TRS-80 Model 100 might do. They boot nearly instantly and have a built-in text editor. (The 32K max memory capacity might be a bit limiting, though.)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You can also download the entire dos word suite from the microsoft website still. They just re-released the entire program for free on their website rather than patch it for y2k.
here is a non-ms mirror:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2005/11/25/free-file/ [downloadsquad.com]
Smartphone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Aren't you more likely to have your cellphone in your pocket than be lugging around a laptop? I just jot notes on my iPhone.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Or have a cell phone which takes voice memos... Mine will record literally hours of voice memo with just the 20mb or so that's left on the 1GB SD card.
But perhaps the guy who submitted the question has a reason for wanting something to actually write the notes on. Possibly he wants to use it during meetings, where he can't speak?
Needlessly Limiting the Field (Score:2)
I don't know if all of E-Macs would be loadable in the limited time frames you are talking about but VI certainly could.
If you press 'i' after you load VI you will experienced a notepad like editing experience that couldn't be easier. When you are done just press esc then x to save and exit or q! to exit without saving. when you see q! think, "quit damnit".
Maybe try non-x86 hardware (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
nethack linux (Score:3, Funny)
boots from a floppy.
0) generate character
1) find magic marker
2) scribble on the floor
Arch Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
I dabbled in Arch Linux a bit a while back. I was booting it off of a USB flash drive (one of the slow cheap ones, not one of the fast new ones) and I am pretty sure it booted in less than 20 seconds. Of course, I had to patch their bootup scripts myself to have it boot that fast, because they had some dumb logic that was waiting a fixed period of time for detected usb devices to show up, rather than polling and exiting the wait loop when the devices were there. So whereas it would always take 10 or 15 seconds (whatever you had configured it to) with their scripts, my change allowed my system to usually wait only a few seconds. Net result, the thing booted pretty quickly. Of course, I submitted a patch to them, and they have done nothing with it, or the bug I opened for the issue, so that put me off Arch Linux pretty quick.
Anyway, there were alot of nice things about Arch Linux; it is vastly streamlined compared to normal Linux. And if you know what you are doing, you can definitely get it under the 20 second boot time with just a little tweaking. Then you have a full-fledged Linux system to work on instead of some hacked together boot/root disks or whatever.
Hibernate. Or get a phone with a notes function. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hibernate. My laptop boots in about 20-30 seconds, with windows XP. I hear Ubuntu boots faster out of hibernation.
Or you could get a cell phone with a note-taking function. My work-provided Palm Treo does this, Blackberrys do, iPhones... Hell, even phones without a full keyboard typically have a notes application these days, and you can type fairly fast with T9-word.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I second the Blackberry idea. I am constantly adding tasks or notes in to my Blackberry, or adding stuff to the calendar. Eventually when I get back to my laptop or desktop my edits are there waiting for me.
Just suspend (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're asking the wrong question here. Any decent laptop with Linux or XP or OSX should be able to go into suspend mode and resume in about 2-8 seconds. I think my laptop hasn't been 'rebooted' in about two months, I just leave it constantly in suspend mode and activate it for 5-30 minutes at a time.
Even if you get a near instant booting OS just the Power on Self Test is going to take longer than resuming from a suspend.
ARM Linux board (Score:4, Interesting)
Heh - I thought TFA was going to be a faster emacs (Score:4, Interesting)
That said, if i really cared to have a text-editor-capable OS boot quickly, _and_ it needed FAT32.
Hmm.
Is VFAT close enough for ya? Win98 boot disk transmuted onto a USB dongle with the VFAT driver in the config.sys. Boot only to command.com, not the full OS.
It'll probably take longer for your box to POST than to boot that puppy.
Me, I just write shit on my hand with a sharpie.
Re:Heh - I thought TFA was going to be a faster em (Score:5, Funny)
I do the same, just on my forehead.
It has obviously made me more efficient, as requests for my IT assistance has dropped markedly.
Use a DS? (Score:4, Interesting)
Resume on a DS is practically instantaneous, at least for commercial titles, and there's a lively homebrew scene, maybe there's already something out there that might work out for you? Plus very portable and easy to scribble with the touchscreen, and great battery life.
Oh, and games too :)
PDA (Score:4, Insightful)
MenuetOS (Score:4, Interesting)
www.menuetos.org
Both 64 and 32 bit versions.
I think you'll find that boots *Very* fast.
Buy more pencils and paper? (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem seems kind of artifical if you're fine working with paper anyway. Otherwise, I'd resort to just leave the machine on, which I usually do anyway.
How about an older PDA? (Score:4, Informative)
Just to jot things down? (Score:5, Informative)
Call me a Luddite, but I carry a small, pocket sized Mead pad around and a small pen.
Behold: http://www.mead.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product3_10051_10006_126671_-1_false_10051 [mead.com]
And you can get it in a different color each time! :)
You may be using the wrong tool (Score:3, Insightful)
I suggest:
1) Use a smaller handheld device to take notes with. All manager of PDAs, Nintendo DS, iPhone and iPod touch can take notes in an instant.
2) If you're going to use a laptop, then leave it in suspend mode and don't power it off when you go mobile.
3) If you must power off the laptop off when mobile, then power it off in Hibernate mode.
Most laptops are hard drive based which means no matter what OS you choose you will be waiting a period of time for the OS to overcome the speed bottleneck of the hard drive.
Our reflectometer works with a DOS PC (Score:4, Interesting)
Last Friday I was using our reflectometer [wikipedia.org] and was impressed by the fact that the PC that controls it boots in about 6 seconds directly into the application! It's based on DOS and the PC is a .... 33MHz Intel 386! It would be cool if a contemporary PC based on a 3GHz CPU could boot into such an application in 0.06 seconds. I know, I/O is the main bottleneck, I guess, though hard disks have indeed gotten about 100 times faster in data transfer, and about 5 times faster in seek time, since the 386 was the hotness.
Try Syllable (Score:3, Interesting)
Hi,
My name is Rick Caudill and I work on the Syllable project. I would say you should give Syllable(www.syllable.org) a try. My machine boots to a gui within 10 seconds. Just give it a try
EPOC (Score:3, Interesting)
A notebook... (Score:3, Funny)
A notebook boots in 2 seconds. You just open it to a blank page, uncap your pen, and voila, the perfect text editor. Plus, you can draw figures without any special software.
The MIT Lisp Machine's "instaboot" feature (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the people saying to use hibernation/sleep features are probably closest to right for most practical purposes now. I thought I'd add a historical side-note...
In the 1980's, MIT Lisp Machines were often used in demos for visitors from funding agencies. Probably mostly people from (D)ARPA. And things would often go wrong. Things had to reboot.
Now instruction times were a lot slower then, but you'd be surprised how little boot times have changed over the years. Seems like every time someone speeds up the hardware, they also slow down the speed of booting of both at least the operating system and maybe also the programs. So normal booting was a process of 30 seconds or a minute, as I recall. And that was inconvenient for these demos.
So someone worked out a way that you could do something called instaboot. You'd load up everything you needed and would save the image, kind of like going into standby mode on your computer. But it was intended to be restarted multiple times. When you started, it would just pull in the pages that you needed first to let you run, pulling in other things you needed on demand.
You could save it in whatever state you wanted, for example with the editor already loaded and started. Even with files loaded ito editor buffers if you wanted, though that obviously ran the risk that if you later edited them on two subsequent occasions, you might get a conflict. But that was up to you. Nothing kept you from trying.
The effect was startling. You could reboot the machine and be up and running in about a second, maybe two. The only evidence was that the screen would change and would kind of bounce (some sort of sync pulse or degaussing thing or something, I never quite knew what that was).
So demos were always loaded and saved, then booted into. When the demo went bad, you just hit reboot. It was so fast, people would notice something had happened but often wouldn't know what. "Just garbage collecting," we would say. Well, it was sort of true. Rebooting is a particularly efficient way to garbage collect.
For some reason, that feature was not carried forward into later models of the Lisp Machine. It was only there on the CADR at MIT (and perhaps the LM-2 and the TI Explorer and LMI Lambda, I'm not sure, since I never used those, though they were repackaged variants of the same thing). It didn't go into the Symbolics 3600 nor later series machines.
Why booting is slow (Score:4, Informative)
A statically linked Linux system with no USB etc can boot in 3 or so seconds to a command line, even on a 100MHz CPU.
Hibernate once, resume many. (HORM) (Score:3, Informative)
XP Embedded SP2 has this funky Hibernate Once, Resume Many [msdn.com] thing now. I don't know if it's possible to properly license the Embedded toolkit for personal use, but the technology is out there and it's interesting.
A blast from the past (Score:5, Informative)
No USB drive compatibility, but instant on.
The love of newspaper field reporters for decades:
http://oldcomputers.net/trs100.html [oldcomputers.net]
Not bad for 1983.
Xubuntu, Custom Debian, Syllable, Haiku (Score:3, Interesting)
From the top of my head:
- (X)Ubuntu with a default XFCE enviroment. [xubuntu.org] Designed for very old computers and people who hate the Gnome/KDE slowpoking.
- Haiku OS [haiku-os.org]. OSS BeOS variant. Lightning fast, designed with the GUI in mind. Sub-10-seconds booting is rumored.
- The Syllable [syllable.org] OS. An OSS OS inspired by the proof-of-concept project Athena OS and some concepts implemented in BeOS. This one is actually quite interesting, as they've come quite far for a project that started from scratch without being a simple Unix rippoff. The site has demo videos showing Syllable coldboot into the Desktop under 10 seconds on older hardware and they've got quite a few apps ported to it allready, including a native browser using a pimped-out webkit renderer. Shutdown is sub 5 seconds (also important). They're working on a completely seperate server variant too. I consider this one a truely interesting alternate OS. You should check it out.
- Current Debian with a 2.2 kernel, Fluxbox or Windowmaker VM and a little tweaking should get you a very lightweight OS enviroment aswell.
Take any of the above and flash them onto a modern bios that you plug into your Mobo and your set for super-fast booting.
You must be doing something wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
XP loads in roughly 4 minutes to usable
Well, mine boots in one minute, and that's including the 25 seconds the RAID controller spends looking for drives (before I installed it, it "booted to desktop" in exactly 26 seconds - I timed it). Add about 3 seconds to start something like Notepad / Textpad (or 6 seconds to start a real word processor) and you should be up and running in 30-90 seconds. Not lightning fast, and slightly slower than a "lightweight" Linux system, but a long way from "4 minutes".
But you can be up and running in much less than that simply by using sleep / hibernate, instead of actually loading the full OS.
Or get a modern PDA / cell phone. You can take photos of anything that's already written down or you can use the sound recorder to take voice notes (this is assuming you don't like typing on a PDA / cell phone keyboard). Then just transfer everything to your PC via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or whatever.
For the true "pen & paper" feel, get a digital pen [destinyplc.co.uk] (Flash-heavy site). You'll still need to find something (or someone) to write on, though.
Alphasmart works better for me than a laptop (Score:3, Interesting)
When I want to write NOW NOW NOW, I reach for my Alphasmart [wikipedia.org]. I like the instant-on ability, and the insanely long battery life.
What really makes me happy is that it doesn't have the usual distractions of a desktop. No internet, no games, no browsing, no music ...
It's a word processor. That's all it does, and it does that one thing very well indeed. And for creative, but easily distracted minds like mine, that's a real plus.
It doesn't host USB formatted drives, though it can be used as a USB keyboard to rapidly transfer your writing to another computer. Just plug it in and hit "send."
Solved 20 Years Ago (Score:3, Interesting)
Twenty years ago I was using DOS. It booted almost instantly. If I wanted to, I might have edited autoexec.bat to include a command to launch an editor at the end of the boot. Or, I might have used a TSR like Sidekick that would have provided access to a text editor, and more, at the touch of a key.
Modern operating systems are several orders of magnitude larger than DOS. Hence, the longer boot times.
Remember, however, that Unix and Linux are text-based operating systems. You don't need to run X, the graphical interface, if you don't want to. You can alter the boot scripts of a Unix/Linux machine to stop at the text interface, ask you which interface you want to use, or just boot in text mode and launch a text editor.
two options (Score:3, Informative)
Ok, lots of people already pointed out the obvious: Sleep mode. For the record: I use a Mac, and it is back up and usable before I'm done opening the lid.
I'd like to point out something even more obvious: Pen & Paper.
Seriously. I'm a techie as much as anyone here, but at work, which is the place where I most often have to take small notes, quickly, and have them handy for reference, I carry a stack of blank index cards and a pen with me. By my estimate it will be 10 more years before something electronic beats that.
If you absolutely need it digital, throw them on a scanner.
If you really, really need them in text format, it isn't that much additional work to just copy them down in a text editor whenever startup time isn't the crucial factor.
Re:Hibernate mode (Score:5, Funny)
I recommend a solution of hydrocyanic acid.
Next question.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The email client just isn't there, and the web browser is just barely better than IE7.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I feel the pain of no mac now. My previous employer gave us all Macs. At the end of the day I would see what time it was, close the lid unplug it and go home. When I got home I would open it, and within a few seconds be right were I was when I left. I do the same in the morning to head back to work. My new employer has given me this damn Peecee which seems to be a total crap shoot if it'll actually resume or not. Sometimes it'll work fine, sometimes the USB keyboard/mouse wont work, sometimes it'll co
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Blimey, things have advanced then. Is this with XP or Vista, out of interest?
My barometer is how many people I see at work wandering the corridors with their laptop, but holding it horizontal with the lid not quite closed. It's basically everyone with a laptop. Until that changes I'll assume in general Windows is still a bit unreliable at this.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
XP.
It's worked fine for some time. I suspect that most people don't have the laptop set to standby when they close the lid or don't know that they can.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)