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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..."
Same here. Both my notebook and desktop work without any problems with sleep and hibernation under vista.
Sleep did not work on either of them under winxp.
This sound like unfounded ms bashing by someone who got frustated.
The bugs that always amaze me are the ones that seemingly would have been caught if anyone had ever actually tried the feature even once.
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The only way I can account for something like this is that perhaps when a bug exhibits "protean symptoms" (fails in a different way every time), one could imagine in a completely bureaucratic, micromanaged corporate environment, instead of being registered as "this always fails," it could be registered as two hundred completely different bug descriptions, each specific description having been recorded only once and therefore judged by management to be unimportant.
"Fails with blue screen of death reading 0687FF13 618AC003
being regarded as a "different" bug from
"Fails with blue screen of death reading 31469B21 96CB2022
And before people start saying "blame the hardware," it's Microsoft's job to make sure that Vista does work on every PC certified for it. The days when DOS said "Toshiba DOS" or "PC-DOS" or "NEC DOS" are long gone. The name on the product is Microsoft WIndows and it's Microsoft's responsibility to see that it works.
It's Microsoft's choice whether to do this by making their code robust, or jawboning vendors at WinHEC, or pressuring vendors.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
> Linux: It doesn't suck. Indeed. Ubuntu 6.10 wakes up from hibernation just fine, and quickly, even on my old computers. How hard can it be?
How hard? Very!
Linux has had 2 (3?) separate attempts to get hibernate support working properly and while it is pretty good now it still isn't perfect.
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
I was thinking about that, and it's actually pretty surprising how well some systems sleep. Mac OS X can sleep through anything short of a disk burn. I have seen very rare cases where vendor specific hardware didn't wake up properly, but that's probably a vendor driver issue. The OS seems to have its act together.
The new intel mac laptops now support hibernate instead of sleep. There is no longer a backup battery in the mac laptops. When you sleep them, they appear to go to sleep instantly, but they are not asleep yet. Display is off, sleep light is on (solid), but it is now paging memory off to disk, and will take my 2gb mbp about 25 seconds to do it. Then you hear the HD park and the sleep light begins pulsing. I try not to stuff it in the bag or jolt it around until it actually parks the HD.
This means you can pull the battery even, and power it back up later and instead of the usual 4 second wakeup time, you get about 20 seconds of watching a washed out image of the last screen, with a dotted progress bar. (looks a bit like a firmware update in progress) When the dots get to the right it's awake again. It has done this from a complete power-down and memory clear. Impressive. I have not noticed anything that fails to wake up properly even from this mode.
Another nice perk is that if you sleep it, and it loses power, (battery is removed by accident, someone kicks out the power cord etc) it simply appears to have shut off. (no sleep light) Then when you try to turn it back on, it just wakes from hibernation with the usual washed out screen and 20 second progresssbar instead of the quick wakeup.
I don't think the mac pro (the desktop) supports hibernate though, but it couldn't be that hard for them to add support for?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I should never have to reboot my laptop. I should be able to pop it into my docking station, resume from hibernation, and have it come up working properly including my desktop monitor and all the other peripherals hooked to the docking station. And the reverse should be true when I leave at night. I've never seen it happen.
Vista will be the best thing ever for third world countries. Do you realise how much PCs will become obsolete the moment it hits the shelves? A large percentage of those PC will be donated to aid organisations, who will install Ubuntu and ship them to Africa.
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
I've concluded that power management is just insanely tricky. APM/ACPI must be inconsistently implemented on every device, otherwise it could never work as poorly as it does.
ACPI does suck. It's a typical M$, "extensible," "do it in software" nightmare described in 500 pages of spec. It reminds me of nothing more than a winmodem. It will be hard even for careful hardware makers to follow and that's what M$ likes.
APM, on the other hand, worked well for laptops and still does if supported. I close the lid and it suspends. I open the lid and everything comes back. Yes, you have to unplug things still but I actually like that. That way, I can close the lid and have some boring operation still going without fear my cats will dance on the keyboard and screw it up. Other quirks are largely due to the fact that APM too is a M$ written "extensible" standard.
The funny thing about all of this is that free software will give you a working system but M$ never has. I've never seen a windoze user who can make good use of power management, despite all sorts of time wasted hunting down drivers and fiddling. At the same time, I've been enjoying multiple month uptime on my laptops for years. The non free way of making code work together is simply broken.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I haven't used a Mac. I do intend to buy a MacBook whenever the next version of the OS (geez, whats it called again? Was it Leapord?) comes out.
But your comment about my Windows experience is off the mark. I never used pirated windows, and I've used pretty much every version of windows in some form or another from 98 SE to Vista (although using that horrible abortion ME wasn't my choice). I worked in tech support for a university campus for a couple of years. I also use Linux. Right now I've got a distro of Ubuntu running on my other box, which I switched to from Fedora Core.
But basically, my point still stands. Of all the versions of linux and windows I've used, none of them have ever properly implemented sleep and hibernation. My computer would go to sleep and never return, or would wake up and promptly crash. With Vista, it just works.
Both suspend and hibernate work fine on this Thinkpad under GNU/Linux... & have done since I got it, almost 2 years ago.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
You can tell it to do something I like even better. It writes everything to disk as you described, but sits in suspended mode instead of hibernate. If your battery goes dead or you yank the battery it will resume from the disk copy, otherwise it pops up instantly just like the Powerbooks. Best of both worlds.
here's something you may not have known: Sun boxen (some workstations) can actually suspend to disk (and power down) and when you resume (such as the next day when you power up the workstation) the unix o/s resumes gracefully and FULLY architected (not a hack but proper part of solaris).
it surprised me since you don't think of Sun as an 'APM' implementation company, but it is true for at least some Sun (blade?) workstations.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."