I always suspend to disk, and am happy with that. I tried suspending to RAM once to see what the effective difference was, and an error message appeared, but before I could read it, the computer went into standby without shutting off. Jiggling the mouse brought it back on, with the session locked. So I was able to see that the error message said my machine doesn't support suspending to RAM. Fine, since suspending to disk works for me; but if the computer were able to suspend to RAM, why might I want to? Is it nothing but an alternative in case my HD doesn't have space?

IF you get it working, suspending/restoring from ram is very very much quicker than suspending/restoring from disk; a matter of a few seconds on my 1.4Ghz Pentium M laptop with 1G memory. In fact, on this particular system, it is faster to shutdown and reboot than to suspend to disk and restore from disk.

The downside is there is a very small amount of power used to maintain the suspended to ram state. I've never personally tested it, but from what I have read, fully draining a laptop battery while suspended to ram would take days rather than hours.

Thanks, that answered my question.