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."
In other words, nice try at a pretence that the article you linked to labels Vista machines as being part of botnets - in fact, the article itself was up on Slashdot before Vista was even released.
I'd be interested to know how widespread these sleeping disorders are.
Our next generation of software is being tested under Vista and we have a number of dedicated test machines and dual boot development machines of different vintages. None of them have any problems at all with suspend or hibernate.
Just because there is a cure it doesn't mean that the problem affects everybody... although I have had hypochondriac computers in the past;)
When will they learn that Microsoft has a very bad Beta Testing Routine.
First they have people pay them to be Beta Testers (for the privilege of being able to use the OS before the general public, and being those jerks who put 3 years of MS Vista experience on their resume). This doesn't attract people who want to thoroughly test the product, this only attracts people who think it is still the 1990s and wants to inflate their resume. So if they did report any bugs or problems it was probably for more minor things or the most major things. Sleep Problems are kinda in the middle annoying but not enough to put a bug report on.
Second poor response from my when bug testers do report a bug. Either they state that it isn't important or the conditions to get it are to off. In contrast I remember putting a bug in for Mozilla years back for an obscure problem on sizing the app across multiple displays of different resolutions. They weren't able to fix it quickly but they kept track of it until it was fixed.
Third Beta Testing is not used as much for Bug Testing but for product evaluation. It is used to see if the product is liked by the general population not as a method of fixing problems. This creates the problem 2 ways because Microsoft Beta Testers are of the following. 1. Love MS so much that they like everything that it does no matter how crappy it is, or make excuses for it problems (Don't get me wrong there are these type of people for every OS)
2. Wants to keep their Resume up to spec to keep in demand of stupid employers so they can have 3 years of Vista Experience. They don't want to report bugs or difficult to use problems because it gives them the advantage over people who just started using production Vista.
3. College Students/Professors mostly because they have extra time during the day to research these things. This group is most likely to report problems and give feedback. But that is only one segment of of the user base. And most college students and professors don't use the sleep options as much because they are on Campus which pays their electricity bills.
From MS's point of view anyway. Just remember what MS is trying to achieve. They are not after perfection, they are just after having something that is good enough to make a sale. It does not have to work 100%.
MS had promised Vista in 2006 and many companies had put Vista buying in their 2006 budgets. Thus, MS had to ship something for these companies to buy in 2006. From the perspective of the customer companies, keeping the budget on track is far more of a deal than a few sleep problems. MS just had to sh
From MS's point of view anyway. Just remember what MS is trying to achieve. They are not after perfection, they are just after having something that is good enough to make a sale. It does not have to work 100%.
Any serious software project cannot achieve 100% perfection. There's simply always another feature to add or a bug to fix. It's even more true for products like Windows which are so exceedingly complex that even small changes can be destabilizing. At a certain point, you have to choose keeping
True. But it is hard to believe that all the talent in MS could spend $5bn and come up with so little. It must be hard for the shareholders to think that Vista is a $5bn improvement to XP.
The biggest sale has to be to the shareholders not the customers.
Fiji is an end-all fix to every problem anyone might have. Just keep the dream of Fiji alive and it will blur out the dull Vista experience, and somehow in the process make it bearable. Just as it did for Truman in The Truman Show.
Maybe it's just me, but I'd think that I didn't do enough testing on a product that already has a codename for it's SP1 within a few months of its release.
Of course it was. Microsoft has released SPs for all of their large pieces of software in recent history. It would be completely stupid to pretend that one wasn't going to come out for Vista. Hence, the planning.
I don't think most slashdot readers understand how difficult it is to stabilize such a large, complex piece of software like Windows. It's just not possible to hold a release until "all the bugs are fixed" if you ever want it to be released.
ReactOS 0.3.1 has been "scheduled to be released within a week" for months now. Development is apparently still progressing; maybe they're just not concentrating on making a release.
Either way, it's unfortunately still a very long way off.
What's odd is that none of those patches or things mentioned going wrong is what I was dealing with. I was getting the click of death from my hard drives until I rebooted the computer.
I guess I can see this as very unfinished hardware drivers but for something as serious as this, Vista should have never been released
Some of the problem seems to be with some nvidia cards. The forums are full of people with 7900s (although not all seem to be affected) having issues returning from sleep.
MS was supposed to have fixed Standby issues as of Windows XP. Nice to see where their priorities are, nothing like the Aero interface I suppose. In all honesty, I'm much more likely to move toward Ubuntu Beryl than Vista.
For once I'm not so sure we should blame Microsoft for all these sleep related problems. I would say hardware manufacturers is just as much to blame. They test their ACPI stuff and make sure it works in the current version of windows, and not that it follows the standard.
When Microsoft creates a new version of windows they most likely develop it to follow the ACPI standard. By doing so, the functionality may break on non compliant boxes, and Microsoft will have to go back to add quirks to make it work.
Being the dominant OS vender, Microsoft at usually manage to get full specs to the failing devices, and have a fair chance of compensate for the errors in the hardware and BIOS. Developers of other less common OSes, such as Linux may not be that lucky. So I really wish Microsoft hadn't bothered to fix this, unless of course they really are the ones that are responsible for this screw up, and left it to the hardware vendors. That way it would be easier for all OS vendors, including Microsoft, in the long run.
Yeesh - has there ever been a version of Windows that handled this well? I can't recall one that didn't have off and on problems, especially on laptops.
Despite the many irritations that my Mac brought with it, this one thing that it does extremely well.
Well, this situation sounds ripe for lampooning in a new one of Apple's "Mac & PC" ads:
Mac and PC in twin beds, an alarm goes off. Mac wakes up but PC was sitting up in bed twitching nervously.
"Good morning--"
"AH!"
"I'm a... Mac."
"And I'm a p-p-PC."
"Hey, PC, haven't you been sleeping?"
"No! No, I, uh, I-I can't sleep."
"Really, do you need something?"
"No, it's not that. I-I mustn't go to sleep because I'm afraid I won't wake up. There have been reports, you know, that since the release of Vista, PCs have had problems with not waking up from sleep."
"Gee, that's too bad. Me, I have no problems waking up from sleep. I mean, within two seconds, I'm up and fully alert. That isn't true for you?"
x64 is Microsoft's term for the similar, and mostly compatible, 64-bit extensions in AMD and Intel processors. In this case, the usage is completely correct.
There is no such thing as "x64." Please quit butchering the use of computer terminology.
Are you retarded? x64 is the extremely important architecture from the early-mid sixties. It wasn't replaced until the x86 architecture in the mid to late 80s.
I've never been in a car accident and neither have any of my friends as far as I know, but I still don't doubt their existence. Requiring seat belts is pure FUD.
Bad analogy. A better one would be a comparison to car recalls. There are two pending for mine but I haven't had the problem (they are minor ones, nothing saftey related)so I keep putting it off. That doesn't mean the design problem doesn't exist; just that it hasn't affected me.
I guess you missed the part about them not being safety related. One is for the seat heater, the other the rear door lock, and neither problem is present in my car. Nice try, better luck next time!
The implication is that it's a far more widespread problem than it is.
I don't know why anyone would think a problem would be common in a monoculture OS, do you?
You're right about it not being widespread. Vista's not selling. How's that for FUD?
There's a massive conspiracy to not purchase Vista! It's kind of like the one I launched against SCO, the infamous Distributed Lack of Purchasing (DLoP) attack. It's all the FUDster's fault. It has nothing to do with the thing taking six years to get here a
Well if you were running Vista, I dare say right now, you would have a certain measure of fear in using sleep, as a result of the uncertainty of your machine resuming and being in doubt as to whether unsaved open documents would be available upon your return, there you go, FUD, is just the natural of using any Windows (P)OS, made even worse if you read the warranty;-))).
I've been using Vista on 3 very different pcs for quite some time now, a desktop, a new laptop and an 18 month old laptop, and I've yet to have any problems with putting any of them into sleep mode and then waking them up again. Now I may have been exceptionally lucky, but I doubt it. Vista FUD is already getting old.
This is the difference between anecdotal evidence and sampling all your customers. Noone is claiming Vista's sleep modes don't work anywhere, in fact, you can bet they were tested and confirmed
"...so it's normal to find hardware not working fine with it"
Couldn't help but to comment on this.
That one sentence is a prime example of a major difference between Windows and Mac users. It is seldom one finds a Mac user who expects stuff not to work properly, whereas I see many Windows users who have this same expectation of performance. I don't understand how one can just casually expect their OS to not work.
Just because there is a reason why doesn't really address the much lower consumer expectations of those who buy windows.
Can you define "much lower expectations"? We're talking about installing Windows on a possibly unsupported/untested configuration. Noone expects your laptop with preinstalled Vista by the manifacturer to hang.
What happens if you try to install OSX on a random self-assembled hardware? Oh yea, it won't even install, license restrictions. Hurray for the much higher expectations.
First of all, I listen to FUD but never really pay attention to it. Secondly, I hold the Mac and it's awake from sleep mode in less than 2 seconds as the pinnacle of what it should be. Third, I've read that Vista does this in it's RTM version. Fourth, It's a blatant lie from Microsoft or whatever review junket that spewed the lie as I've had the displeasure of having to turn off the sleep function on an 2 week old Dell as 3 and a half minutes is way too long to awake from sleep. I already know Microsoft is crap
I used to run Linux on my laptop (an IBM T40). When every distro I tried (Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo) had a kernel panic upon resuming from sleep, I gave up. From everything I read about this problem, power management is pretty delicate. Even if it works on one person's hardware it might have problems on a nearly identical computer. Apple has a huge advantage over Microsoft and the Linux community in that their testing can cover every hardware configuration that consumers can buy. As for your problem with a slow
Well.... On 3 out of 4 desktop systems I've tried, power management, especially standby, is horribly broken. Standby worked fine under XP on all 4 systems.
I can confirm this is not FUD and yes, you have been somewhat lucky. Lenovo/IBM ThinkPad R5x and T6x both exhibit problems with Vista sleep disorders. Even with the latest patches and bios updates the OS is very unstable after wake up from hibernation or sleep.
Lenovo has hinted that further Microsoft updates will be needed to Vista to make sleep/hibernation fully usable again.
I'm interested to know what kind of hardware are you using?
I'm not even considering jumping ship to Vista until the first SP is out (XP works beautifully for me).
Exactly the same. Especially since IE7 is more or less the same for me as a webdev, I can test all of my stuff on XP.
And we gotta realize: early adotpers always get stuffed with higher prices and lower quality. It's just the way things are, even if the product is developed under most stringent quality requirements, a bunch of undetected defects will be known soon after a wide launch.
The only thing that bothers me here is that on many consumer offers, companies FORCE you to get OEM Vista with a new PC. This early after launch, and with so many known flaws, how could you possibly require your customers to buy Vista PC when XP is much better right now?!
Do you have such experiences yourself? How easy it is to get a "downgrade" and in which hardware vendors it's easiest to do so?
2000 used to work beautifully for me, I never considered to jump the ship to XP. Then I had to buy a laptop (from Dell)... Your turn will come. I installed a debian on it but still, somewhere in the price, I have bought XP somewhere.
Ah! (Score:5, Funny)
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In other words, nice try at a pretence that the article you linked to labels Vista machines as being part of botnets - in fact, the article itself was up on Slashdot before Vista was even released.
Lies, lies, and more lies. Tragic, really.
How widespread? (Score:4, Interesting)
Our next generation of software is being tested under Vista and we have a number of dedicated test machines and dual boot development machines of different vintages. None of them have any problems at all with suspend or hibernate.
Just because there is a cure it doesn't mean that the problem affects everybody
When will they learn. (Score:5, Insightful)
First they have people pay them to be Beta Testers (for the privilege of being able to use the OS before the general public, and being those jerks who put 3 years of MS Vista experience on their resume). This doesn't attract people who want to thoroughly test the product, this only attracts people who think it is still the 1990s and wants to inflate their resume. So if they did report any bugs or problems it was probably for more minor things or the most major things. Sleep Problems are kinda in the middle annoying but not enough to put a bug report on.
Second poor response from my when bug testers do report a bug. Either they state that it isn't important or the conditions to get it are to off. In contrast I remember putting a bug in for Mozilla years back for an obscure problem on sizing the app across multiple displays of different resolutions. They weren't able to fix it quickly but they kept track of it until it was fixed.
Third Beta Testing is not used as much for Bug Testing but for product evaluation. It is used to see if the product is liked by the general population not as a method of fixing problems. This creates the problem 2 ways because Microsoft Beta Testers are of the following.
1. Love MS so much that they like everything that it does no matter how crappy it is, or make excuses for it problems (Don't get me wrong there are these type of people for every OS)
2. Wants to keep their Resume up to spec to keep in demand of stupid employers so they can have 3 years of Vista Experience. They don't want to report bugs or difficult to use problems because it gives them the advantage over people who just started using production Vista.
3. College Students/Professors mostly because they have extra time during the day to research these things. This group is most likely to report problems and give feedback. But that is only one segment of of the user base. And most college students and professors don't use the sleep options as much because they are on Campus which pays their electricity bills.
It works fine! (Score:2)
MS had promised Vista in 2006 and many companies had put Vista buying in their 2006 budgets. Thus, MS had to ship something for these companies to buy in 2006. From the perspective of the customer companies, keeping the budget on track is far more of a deal than a few sleep problems. MS just had to sh
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Any serious software project cannot achieve 100% perfection. There's simply always another feature to add or a bug to fix. It's even more true for products like Windows which are so exceedingly complex that even small changes can be destabilizing. At a certain point, you have to choose keeping
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The biggest sale has to be to the shareholders not the customers.
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They have a codename for Vista's SP1 already (Score:3, Interesting)
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http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/02
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1995 called (Score:5, Funny)
Fiji is Vista SP1? (Score:2)
What are your sources that Fiji is the codename of Vista SP1 anyway? For what we know, Microsoft confirmed neither of those.
When will they fix the DRM bug? (Score:4, Funny)
Of course, they'll probably claim they can't take out the DRM because it's a crucial part of the operating system.
Hmmm - wonder how ReactOS is doing lately....
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Either way, it's unfortunately still a very long way off.
More Disorders (Score:2, Funny)
I'm so shocked (Score:2, Interesting)
What's odd is that none of those patches or things mentioned going wrong is what I was dealing with. I was getting the click of death from my hard drives until I rebooted the computer.
I guess I can see this as very unfinished hardware drivers but for something as serious as this, Vista should have never been released
Problems with Nvidia (Score:2)
Standy Issues (Score:2)
Probably not Microsofts fault (Score:5, Interesting)
When Microsoft creates a new version of windows they most likely develop it to follow the ACPI standard. By doing so, the functionality may break on non compliant boxes, and Microsoft will have to go back to add quirks to make it work.
Being the dominant OS vender, Microsoft at usually manage to get full specs to the failing devices, and have a fair chance of compensate for the errors in the hardware and BIOS.
Developers of other less common OSes, such as Linux may not be that lucky. So I really wish Microsoft hadn't bothered to fix this, unless of course they really are the ones that are responsible for this screw up, and left it to the hardware vendors. That way it would be easier for all OS vendors, including Microsoft, in the long run.
Historical Perspective (Score:2)
Despite the many irritations that my Mac brought with it, this one thing that it does extremely well.
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Still, I would assume backwards compatibility. No scratch that--I would expect it, but wouldn't count on it.
Mac and PC (Score:5, Funny)
Mac and PC in twin beds, an alarm goes off. Mac wakes up but PC was sitting up in bed twitching nervously.
"Good morning--"
"AH!"
"I'm a... Mac."
"And I'm a p-p-PC."
"Hey, PC, haven't you been sleeping?"
"No! No, I, uh, I-I can't sleep."
"Really, do you need something?"
"No, it's not that. I-I mustn't go to sleep because I'm afraid I won't wake up. There have been reports, you know, that since the release of Vista, PCs have had problems with not waking up from sleep."
"Gee, that's too bad. Me, I have no problems waking up from sleep. I mean, within two seconds, I'm up and fully alert. That isn't true for you?"
"..."
"Uh, PC? PC, hello? Hey, PC, wake up!"
"..."
"Oh my."
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Are you retarded? x64 is the extremely important architecture from the early-mid sixties. It wasn't replaced until the x86 architecture in the mid to late 80s.
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Based on how many samples? If a smoker lives to his nineties, and some of them do, will that prove there are no links between smoking and cancer?
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Implication? (Score:3, Insightful)
The implication is that it's a far more widespread problem than it is.
I don't know why anyone would think a problem would be common in a monoculture OS, do you?
You're right about it not being widespread. Vista's not selling. How's that for FUD?
There's a massive conspiracy to not purchase Vista! It's kind of like the one I launched against SCO, the infamous Distributed Lack of Purchasing (DLoP) attack. It's all the FUDster's fault. It has nothing to do with the thing taking six years to get here a
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This is the difference between anecdotal evidence and sampling all your customers. Noone is claiming Vista's sleep modes don't work anywhere, in fact, you can bet they were tested and confirmed
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Couldn't help but to comment on this.
That one sentence is a prime example of a major difference between Windows and Mac users. It is seldom one finds a Mac user who expects stuff not to work properly, whereas I see many Windows users who have this same expectation of performance. I don't understand how one can just casually expect their OS to not work.
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Can you define "much lower expectations"? We're talking about installing Windows on a possibly unsupported/untested configuration. Noone expects your laptop with preinstalled Vista by the manifacturer to hang.
What happens if you try to install OSX on a random self-assembled hardware? Oh yea, it won't even install, license restrictions. Hurray for the much higher expectations.
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Secondly, I hold the Mac and it's awake from sleep mode in less than 2 seconds as the pinnacle of what it should be.
Third, I've read that Vista does this in it's RTM version.
Fourth, It's a blatant lie from Microsoft or whatever review junket that spewed the lie as I've had the displeasure of having to turn off the sleep function on an 2 week old Dell as 3 and a half minutes is way too long to awake from sleep.
I already know Microsoft is crap
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As for your problem with a slow
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I can confirm this is not FUD and yes, you have been somewhat lucky. Lenovo/IBM ThinkPad R5x and T6x both exhibit problems with Vista sleep disorders. Even with the latest patches and bios updates the OS is very unstable after wake up from hibernation or sleep.
Lenovo has hinted that further Microsoft updates will be needed to Vista to make sleep/hibernation fully usable again.
I'm interested to know what kind of hardware are you using?
Turn on AHCI after installation (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I'm not going to be an early-adopter lemming (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly the same. Especially since IE7 is more or less the same for me as a webdev, I can test all of my stuff on XP.
And we gotta realize: early adotpers always get stuffed with higher prices and lower quality. It's just the way things are, even if the product is developed under most stringent quality requirements, a bunch of undetected defects will be known soon after a wide launch.
The only thing that bothers me here is that on many consumer offers, companies FORCE you to get OEM Vista with a new PC. This early after launch, and with so many known flaws, how could you possibly require your customers to buy Vista PC when XP is much better right now?!
Do you have such experiences yourself? How easy it is to get a "downgrade" and in which hardware vendors it's easiest to do so?
Parent
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The advantage to those, if you just need to update say your web browser, or music app, or other random file tool you don't have to reboot.