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Vista an Uneasy Sleeper
Emmy King writes "
One thing we just can't wrap our mind about is the terrible, broken, and completely pitiful support for waking Vista up from a Deep Sleep or hibernation.Anytime you attempt to wake Vista up from Hibernation or "Deep Sleep" (S3-induced sleep mode), it dies. It's either a BSOD, or a driver error, or a broken network, no DWM, lack of sound... the list goes on, and on. So much for an operating system to "power" the future! (No pun intended!) That's with properly-signed drivers and no buggy software on multiple PCs..."
Each new release, each patch, each service pack I keep waiting for the perfect, all-right-I'll-settle-for-well-behaved advanced power control. I find this unsettling Vista may not deliver. One "feature" I always treasure in Windows systems is its "better" support for power control.
At least Windows with its more cozy relationship with chip and BIOS industry supposedly offers ACPI for fast "sleep" and "rewake" functionality. In fact that was my trick way to get ACPI for linux when it was really important by running a vmware install of linux within a well behaved windows (not always as well behaved as I'd have wished, but better than the problematic ACPI linux support).
And now, out of the gates (sic) Vista may not deliver? That's going to leave a mark. I'd considered getting a machine for educational purposes (since I do support for everyone I know), but I'd considered waiting for some of the initial bugs to get ironed out. I just didn't expect this big of an initial speedbump. Guess there's not much to do but wait for Microsoft to get it right, or close to right.
Also, I thought I'd read they were offering super-sized power control a la scheduled up and down times, etc. More vaporware?
I'm still amazed they get to skate on this kind of stuff.
I've had fewer problems with my laptop since installing vista than I ever had with linux.
.. but vista sleeping and waking up works just fine.
... whereas it seems to work now in vista just fine?
Pretty much everything worked 'out-the-box' -- including video (although I ultimately had to go download the vista drivers from ATI to get any kind of acceleration), sound, even suspend/sleep (although, microsoft renaming hibernate to sleep confused me at first).
There are plenty of places where microsoft seems to suck across the board
BTW - this sleeping is a feature that I never did get 100% working properly in linux -- and what I WAS able to get working right required I bounce around a few websites ultimatly doing my own research
S3 (Suspend) doesn't exactly work wonderfully under other operating systems either. It's highly dependant on the motherboard chipset being used, and all attached hardware.
I would be quicker to condem Microsoft if Linux (or FreeBSD preferably) could properly suspend and resume ANY of my systems properly. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.
FreeBSD-6.2 was the closest I got... If I pull out my videocard and use the onboard, it actually resumes successfully.
Though the onboard video (Savag) really blows, and I haven't yet found any version of X.org that doesn't regularly crash when using that particular driver.
And both the onboard nic, and my SBlive card stop working, and I have to manually reload the kernel module every time I resume...
And with all of those addeniums, that's the closest I've ever gotten to getting Suspend to work (and being forced to use the onboard video is a complete show-stopper). In fact, the latest snapshot of 7.0 was actually a downgrade, and wouldn't resume from S3 at all.
So the problem can't lie entirely with Microsoft (though they are partly to blame for the extremely lax and often Windows-centric ACPI practices). Hardware manufacturers bare a great deal of the responsibility for making their ACPI implimentations buggy as all hell to begin with... So much so that even Microsoft apparently can't even work-around it.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
We currently have 4 systems running Vista RTM and a not one of them has any problem waking up from hibernate. They are a mix of P4, AMD XP, and Athlons.
We had Vista RC1 & 2 on other systems, both desktops & laptops, and they behaved perfectly as well.
They all respond perfectly to Wake-On-LAN too. I know this because our tape backup system sends WOL packets to the systems to do the backups.
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
The pun was clearly intended, otherwise there would not have been quotation marks around 'power'.
Why can't we all just be honest about our use of puns? Puns are not always bad. There's no need to be ashamed of them.
52 52'23" W 47 32'07" N
How hard? Very!
You are right about this. It isn't hard for anybody with a bit of coding experience to realize that trying to freezedry, serialize and then defrost an entire multitasking OS full of running tasks and hardware is a very difficult task. Especially when computers today are often busy talking to other computers (you can't really expect every TCP connection to suddenly spring to life where it was).
That said, Ubuntu 6.10 does hibernate very, very, well. Try it.
When XP came out many (many many many) systems could not boot in ACPI mode. Many systems had a bios that would report as supporting ACPI and then fall over in an unexpected way... what resolved this was.... time in market. Once it became important to boot XP it became important to pay attention to the ACPI spec. The XP installer actually has a backdoor built in for those dark days of 2001... you can bang on "f7" when you boot into textmode setup (the media-boot phase) and setup will ignore ACPI support.
Vista no longer supports non-acpi machines. Vista also tries to do more with power management and if you have current-ish system from a major OEM (dell, gateway, sony, toshiba, hp, etc) they've already posted BIOS updates to make things go in the brave new world. Partnering with the big guys is where MS can recover some depth in the hardware space.
Vista now provides a new hybrid sleep mode, combining standby with hibernation. The sleep option will write out a hibernate file so that if the machine takes a nap & runs out of juice (laptop scenario here) you can plug the box in and resume without losing your context. I'm typing on a Dell xps m170 right now -- it works well.