Gigarom 4/Mac Giga-ROM 4.0 - 1993.toast/FILES/EXT/P-T/PBTools 1.2.sea/SpinD™ Read Me

Text File | 1992-03-23 | 4KB | 57 lines

SpinD™ is Copyright ©1992 Bill Steinberg. All Rights Reserved. SpinD is free. This document
describes version 1.0 of SpinD. If you distribute SpinD, it must be free, and you must include this
documentation.

SpinD is a small FKey that spins down the internal hard drive in Macs that support that function. In
Macs that don't support drive spin down, the FKey just beeps and exits.

SpinD will take just under 200 bytes of your System Heap. It's loaded when your System File opens (if
you've installed the FKey in your System File). If you load the FKey via Suitcase, it will be loaded when
Suitcase opens the SpinD.FKey file.

SpinD.FKey should work on all the PowerBooks (100,140,170), and I suspect on the Apple Portable.

SpinD.FKey comes as a ResEdit document. The FKey is set to 0, but it can be set to anything you like.
Please leave the resource attributes as they are (System Heap and PreLoad ONLY). Note that as of
System 7, FKeys are officially a no-no (aka reserved by Apple), which is why there is no nice and easy
Apple supplied way to deal with FKeys. I use ResEdit... If you don't know what FKeys are, or what
ResEdit is, drop me a note on CompuServe (76703,1027), and I'll steer you to the correct forum and
section to learn.

Things to know:

The whole idea (for me, ie why I wrote SpinD) came afterI had a taste of my PB100 (8/20 then, now
8/80) lasting over three hours on a charge the second or third day I had it. It took me almost a month to
figure out how to get 3+ hours on a charge. Though the backlight does consume the most power, the
drive seems to run a close second, when it's spinning. If you keep the backlight down a bit, and you try
to keep your drive spun down most of the time, you can get 3 hours out of your 100 easily, and
maximize the time on your 140/170 too (though, since I don't have one of them, I can't give you
estimates).

Now, the SpinD FKey is only a small part of "try to keep your drive spun down most of the time." You
do NOT want to spin the drive down and have it spin up again in 10 seconds. The drive consumes about 4
times the power to Spin Up than to just keep spinning. It takes about 5 or so seconds for a room temp
drive (the 20 or 80 in my 100, anyway) to spin up. I use the rule "If I think I'm going to hit the drive
in the next minute, I won't manually spin down the drive."

You want to set the defaults in the Portable CDCev correctly first. Correctly for me may be different
from correctly for you. I have mine set for 2 minutes (drive) and 4 minutes (full sleep). This is one
half what the default is. I factored in annoyance as well as power consumption in making my choices. It
is rare that I go 4 minutes without doing anything without engaging sleep myself (via control clicking
on SuperClock), so I want the computer to sleep if I forget.

I have the luxury of an 8 meg machine. I keep a 2 meg disk cache (Memory CDev). I find this MUCH
more useful (and safer) than a Ram Disk. By loading in (running) 3 or 4 of my most often used
applications when I first boot, and using sleep, instead of Shut Down, I have instant access to
everything, and mostly no disk access. As an example, I almost always have DayMaker [mostly ram
based], MSWord 4 .0d [set to load itself and the document into memory], CompuServe Navigator [with
no face files, and set to NOT display faces], and the battery Control Panel open.  When I add a bunch of
appointments to my calendar (DayMaker), I save the file (think safety), and then either sleep the
machine or spin down the drive. Use the application menu to hide the applications you're not currently
using. If you have a 2 meg machine, well, you're going to be accessing the drive a lot, and you may not
have as much need for SpinD...

Bill Steinberg - Mon, Mar 16, 1992
CompuServe 76703,1027 (Preferred)
AppleLink X0542