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Vista an Uneasy Sleeper
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun Dec 10, 2006 09:17 AM
from the just-like-most-3-year-olds dept.
from the just-like-most-3-year-olds dept.
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.'
Any time 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..."
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Prescription Meds For Vista Sleep Disorder 144 comments
Arnold O'Connor writes "NeoSmart Technologies has compiled a list of hotfixes and patches provided by Microsoft for Windows Vista that address a large number of issues related to waking/resuming a Vista PC (both x86 and x64) from sleep or hibernation. Sleep-related disorders have plagued Vista since its release, though they were not present in earlier betas. Most of these fixes are due to be included in Windows Vista SP1 — codenamed Fiji."
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Linux (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Linux (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Linux (Score:4, Funny)
When Ballmer is throwing chairs all over the office, it is pretty hard to program ACPI stuff.
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How hard can it be? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:How hard can it be? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:How hard can it be? (Score:4, Insightful)
What bothers me are snide remarks from people who have a very vague (if any) understanding of what is involved in power management support. At all. So Microsoft dropped the non-ACPI HALs with Vista. About time. Considering the number of ACPI "compliant" systems out there, I'm not surprised a lot of this shit barely works. Get a new computer and shut the hell up already...
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Re:How hard can it be? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you used something native or if the manufacturer supported linux you'd probably be OK. I've experienced this myself.
Re:How hard can it be? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't see how this is such a huge deal in Vista, anyway. It seems to work fine under XP, and you're going to be running most of the same apps for now...
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
They say each successive version is "more stable and secure!"
And with 9 shut down options to boot... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And with 9 shut down options to boot... (Score:5, Funny)
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S3 is not hibernate/deep sleep. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:S3 is not hibernate/deep sleep. (Score:4, Funny)
Seriously, KDE can get it right, Mac OS X can get it right. What's so wrong with: Sleep, Restart, Shutdown (, Logout)
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Re:S3 is not hibernate/deep sleep. (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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Re:S3 is not hibernate/deep sleep. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:S3 is not hibernate/deep sleep. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:S3 is not hibernate/deep sleep. (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.almaer.com/blog/archives/001182.html [almaer.com]
Pop open a terminal, type in
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
and your MB will go back to suspend only. Replace the 0 with a 1 and you're in the (default) hibernate only mode. Use a 3 and the MBP will do as I described, suspending but also writing everything to disk so it can resume if it loses power.
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Re:S3 is not hibernate/deep sleep. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Press SHIFT to se all commands! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
bummer (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:bummer (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Screw Ups (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Screw Ups (Score:5, Interesting)
Sleep did not work on either of them under winxp.
This sound like unfounded ms bashing by someone who got frustated.
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MSDN (Score:3, Informative)
Ghee, I musta been sleeping... (Score:4, Funny)
Or maybe I'm still sleeping and this is a dream. Vista released with major operational flaws. Now that's a Linux promotion!
"no buggy software" (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void) {
char msg[10];
gets(msg);
printf("%d\n", (int) msg);
printf(msg, "Hello, World!");
printf("%s\n", msg);
return 1;
}
"power" the future (Score:3, Funny)
Blame ACPI, not Vista (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Uneasy lies the head... (Score:5, Funny)
-Henry IV. Part II.
Not exactly great with other OSes (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
"Did anyone ever try this even once?" (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Pun... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
And this is why... (Score:3, Funny)
...we wait for Vista SP1 before making the jump.
Also, because DX10 cards (and titles) will be ubiquitous by then.
"He's resting." (Score:3, Funny)
Why do I have this urge to post the entire Monte Python "Dead Parrot" sketch? [mtholyoke.edu]
My Experience is Completely the Opposite (Score:3, Informative)
The OP makes it sound like their experience applies to everyone, so I have to call FUD on this.
At any rate, I have zero problems with these features, using Vista Home Ultimate 64 bit.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 dis
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It might be the end of the day, time to go home, huggle the wife and get some sleep and stuff? Nice to have everything the way you when tomorrow morning.comes. Or your server might need replacing the UPS. Hibernate is one easy way to get this done.
Just guessing, of course. I use hibernation every day with my Debian laptop.
Re:Why are you even putting it in sleep mode (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Why are you even putting it in sleep mode (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Slashdot Ramps Up the Vista FUD (Score:4, Interesting)
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