Hi Thomas,
You can use FDAPM APMDOS to save energy while there is low CPU load, which is most of the time in DOS. You can use FDAPM SUSPEND or FDAPM STANDBY to put the system in a low power state, if your BIOS does support that. You can use FDAPM SPEEDn with N being a digit from 1 to 8 to reduce CPU activity to N * 12.5% of the time, if FDAPM understands your ACPI data. Newer versions are usually too complicated or big for it. If anything goes wrong with FDAPM, you may have to do a hard reset or keep the power button pressed to completely power off your computer, then reboot. You can use PCISLEEP S to put some PCI devices in a lower power state or PCISLEEP V to put your PCI, AGP or PCIe graphics card into a suspend state. If PCICLEEP fails to soft-reboot it, you will have to do a hard reset, so your mileage may vary. Because DOS usually boots very fast, the easiest method to save energy is probably to just power off your computer while not using it, but I get your point that 10 seconds to boot still is time. The FDAPM package also contains the separate IDLEDPMS binary which you can use as resident energy-saving screen saver. You load it as IDLEDPMS n where n is a time in minutes. After the given time without a keypress, the screen will be told to go to suspend until a key is pressed again. FDAPM APMDOS also works in the background, but IDLEDPMS and FDAPM only use little memory. You can also use the FreeDOS IDLEHALT=... kernel based config sys option for saving energy, in similar but less effective ways as FDAPM :-) The other commands, PCISLEEP and FDAPM STANDBY or ... SUSPEND or FDAPM SPEEDn, all take action immediately when you run them. No resident mode. FDAPM also has commands to tell the harddisk to spin down. You probably want to use DIFFERENT tools which can program the harddisk to do that automatically each time when it is not in use for a configurable amount of time. FDAPM does not have a feature to access the configuration. Maybe somebody else can recommend a free, maybe even open source, tool for the harddisk spin down timer configuration. Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
