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

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.

[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?

"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.

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?

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 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.