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..."

Comments

Re:Linux

[WilliamSChips]

Linux: It doesn't suck.

And with 9 shut down options to boot...

[192939495969798999]

So which of those 9 shut-down options can we eliminate now? Probably all but the one that goes "shut the hell off"?

Re:And with 9 shut down options to boot...

[Frumious Wombat]

They have to keep it, as it's an important usability option. Now your computer can act like you first thing in the morning. HAL, here we come!

S3 is not hibernate/deep sleep.

[Junta]

S3 is plain old suspend/sleep. hibernate/deep sleep implies suspend to disk and total power down, and is S4. And the word S3-induced makes no sense, S3 is a state entered into, not an active thing.

Re:S3 is not hibernate/deep sleep.

[jZnat]

But he's criticising Windows Vista, not Windows 2000. Have you seen Vista's shutdown menu? Have you read the article on Slashdot about how much time and effort went into making it?

Re:S3 is not hibernate/deep sleep.

[v1]

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?

Re:S3 is not hibernate/deep sleep.

[ribond]

The difference in the apple product model shows through here. Power management problems like those described by the story submitter (love that random complaints can be slashdot front page material) are related to bios in use, drivers in use... apple folk obviously deliver an OS to a limited set of hardware, drivers, bioses (did I pluralize that properly?). Windows tries to be all things to all people. breadth vs. depth, etc...

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.

Re:S3 is not hibernate/deep sleep.

[ceoyoyo]

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.

bummer

[yagu]

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.

Screw Ups

[Anonymous Coward]

So someone fucks it up and it's irrevocably broken? I've used both sleep and hibernate functions on my laptop since Vista was beta 1 and both have worked beautifully. Both features require decent support from the hardware, not just "signed drivers."

Re:Screw Ups

[doctormetal]

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.

"no buggy software"

[woodhouse]

I'd like to know where this completely bug free software comes from. The last completely bug-free software I saw was Hello World.

Re:Linux

[WindozeSux]

How hard can it be?
When Ballmer is throwing chairs all over the office, it is pretty hard to program ACPI stuff. :-)

Blame ACPI, not Vista

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm vociferously anti-MS; but in this case, I believe they deserve a small pardon. Go read the ACPI specifications sometime. You will cry and beg for mercy. ACPI is horrible. Considering the small number of requirements the real world has for such an interface, the specification is vast beyond imagining. Linux has also had long standing problems producing a proper ACPI layer, for this very reason: ACPI is a pig.

Now it is worth noting that MS themselves contributed to the development of this specification. The cynical side of me believes that confounding the competition by way of impenetrable specifications is simply Microsoft's modis operandi. Look at Microsoft's OpenXML specification for example: while in theory it meets the European requirement for documenting file formats and protocols, in practice it's ~6,000 pages will certainly confound all but the most determined attempts at interoperability. But here's the rub: Microsoft has to eat their own dog food, and they are suffering the consequences. Microsoft's operating system and applications are becoming so piggish that even Microsoft can't manage them.

fud ahead

[Silicon Avatar]

I've had fewer problems with my laptop since installing vista than I ever had with linux.

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 .. but vista sleeping and waking up works just fine.

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 ... whereas it seems to work now in vista just fine?

Uneasy lies the head...

[hey!]

Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude,
And in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then happy low, lie down!
Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.

-Henry IV. Part II.

Not exactly great with other OSes

[evilviper]

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.

No problems here at all.

[Marbleless]

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.

Pun...

[Five Bucks!]

So much for an operating system to "power" the future! (No pun intended!)

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.

How many times do you test before calling it truth

[HairyCanary]

I just opened my laptop and turned it on, and it resumed from a hibernate just fine (running Vista Business release version). No blue screen, no network problems, it put me right back where I was before with a perfectly functional session. I hate Windows as much as every other Unix geek, but it sounds to me like this is a classic case of "not enough research" ... or if you prefer, "fud".

How hard can it be?

[Marbleless]

> 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.

Re:How hard can it be?

[hanssprudel]

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.

Re:Press SHIFT to se all commands!

[Fred_A]

You can also press Alt, Super and Meta to see even more options such as doze, slumber, nap, snooze, relax, take a rest, nod off, or crash. I'm not sure what they do though.

Re:Why are you even putting it in sleep mode

[Anonymous Coward]

Sleep is for girls, n00bs, and douchebags. The rest of us leave 'em up on all the time. And fuck laptops. If you need to write code on holiday then you're not a real developer. Real developers don't *go* on holiday.

Re:Slashdot Ramps Up the Vista FUD

[kryten_nl]

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.