Vista an Uneasy Sleeper 395
Emmy King writes "
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..."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.
Linux (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Linux (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Linux (Score:4, Funny)
When Ballmer is throwing chairs all over the office, it is pretty hard to program ACPI stuff.
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.
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.
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...
Re:How hard can it be? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. But how come, Win2k and XP hibernation features work damn near perfect and Vista doesn't?
I hibernate my XP laptop every night and I've yet to encounter a BSOD or another problem. Well, I did encounter a couple of instances where the network wouldn't work, but disabling and re-enabling the network fixed that.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'll assume you wanted an answer.
Hardware was designed with W2K and XP as their development test cases, and was specifically made to work with those OSes. XP is only an incremental update over W2K (ver 5.1 from 5.0), whereas Vista is a complete rewrite in many areas. So they code power management according to the spec, such that all ACPI-compliant devices will work, then they make tweaks and exceptions for
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
---John Holmes...
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...
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)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
What options must I think of???
Option 1. Shutdown Vista.
Option 2. Hybernate mode.
Option 3. Restart.
Option 4. Force Shutdown.
Option 5. Shutdown all Users in Usergroup.
Option 6. Shutdown all Users in Network
Option 7. Restart in Safemode.
Option 8. Restart in Safemode (network conn).
and finaly last one!
Option 9. Shutdown every Vista User PC located in the world!!!
whahahaha!
Le Marquis
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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?
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:S3 is not hibernate/deep sleep. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:S3 is not hibernate/deep sleep. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Press SHIFT to se all commands! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
IIRC "Deep Sleep" is not the official name of any ACPI state, although some refer to S3 that was ("deep" relative to S1).
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.
Re: (Score:2)
ACPI Sucks. (Score:2, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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 t
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 S
Re: (Score:2)
If you want that, get a Mac. My iBook has been waking from sleep reliably (and almost instantaneously!) since 2003, and the new Intel Macs can hibernate, too.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
MSDN (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Only in the *final* (Score:2, Informative)
Throughout the beta, Deep Sleep in Windows Vista went great. [...] But in the final version of Windows Vista, something is very, very majorly wrong.
The problem is in the final version only, not a beta. This wasn't mentioned in the Slashdot summary, though, which could have saved confusion for those that don't RTFA.
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!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"no buggy software" (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Really? The last time I ran "Hello World" a virus did a low level format of my hard disk...or was that "ILOVEU"???
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Nope, has an output format bug. It should end with an exclamation point, as in: "Hello World!"
Hello World bug free? (Score:2)
Yeah, right -- I bet it had a buffer overflow in printf or something!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
int main(void) {
char msg[4];
sprintf(msg, "Hello, World!");
printf("%s\n", msg);
return 0;
}
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;
}
Hibernating (Score:2)
Interesting that TFA says Vista hibernated fine in beta but not in the release version. Oddly, Xp hibernated flawlessly on my laptop but openSuSE 10.1 hangs every time. No Linux distro hibernates this particular laptop (toshiba). We'll see if 10.2 will as soon as ATI gets done developing Vista drivers and gives us a driver for Xorg 7.2
Re: (Score:2)
Do you mean suspend? Hibernate is only very slightly better than shutting down and restarting again. Suspend on the other hand, is overwhelmingly fantastic.
"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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not a single issue with sleep or standby (Score:2, Insightful)
They don't quite Bill's 6 second boot time either - but both systems clock in right around 10 seconds, and that's pretty hard to complain about.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
That's a good version, but for some reason they plan to make it obsolete rather quickly and replace it with Henry VI, which is far more inferior. This, plus the ensuing civil war and an unavoidable Richard III rootkit, tends to drive up the TOC.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Just as a point of comparison, since you mention external devices and motherboards, I have a oldish Powerbook, say I
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Why is it Microsoft's job to simplify a process so it can be better implemented by their competitors?
If you have evidence that they are demanding companies test against Windows exclusively, maybe you have a legitimate gripe. Short of that, they aren't doing anything wrong (by not forcing to a spec) that I can see. Besides which, it sounds like the companies are making a choice that testing against Windows and ignoring other markets is a cost-effective tradeoff.
Point of view (Score:2)
From a business standpoint? It isn't Microsoft's job. From a technical standpoint? That should be obvious. (Quality control, ease of implementation, etc.)
The fact they prefer to use their dominant market position to make it harder for competitors, rather than making it better for everyone, is one of the reasons Microsoft is not good for computing, nor for business.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The main reason is that ACPI bugs can be worked-around in software (if you know everything there is to know about the hardware and BIOS implementation) and the manufacturer has to write a driver anyhow. So they do a quick, one-off driver that just barely works, and don't care about all the problems that will result from that mindset in th
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I like to test my application software on a fresh virtual machine. You'd be surprised how often having a stray dll around saves your ass while you're running, so you need to test on a fresh machine.
ON the other hand, you can't test for every case where a stray dll will do you in. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the people having this problem are upgraders.
No input file specified. (Score:2)
And the site crashes (Score:2)
Does this work in Linux? (Score:2)
I wasn't planning on laptop installs anyway (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
How many times do you test before calling it truth (Score:5, Informative)
Works for me syndrome... (Score:3, Informative)
but it sounds to me like this is a classic case of "not enough research"
A rather funny comment coming from someone who presumably tested one system and found it to work, so therefore all systems must work.
The article mentions that the author had problems with "deep sleep" on 6 of 8 systems.
So he's obviously not making the claim that hiberate/Deep Sleep is broken on ALL systems, since there w
Only In America!! (Score:2)
Global Warning Denial USA Rules OK!!
Questions about sleeping (Score:2, Informative)
What happens with network applications (take google earth as an example - it connects and logs in at program start)?
How about a domain?
What happens if you go to sleep on one domain and wake up plugged into another?
What happens when you wake up outside the login hours?
What happens if your server slot is taken for an application (because you disconnected and someone else took it)?
What happens if you are editing a
Re: (Score:2)
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]
Apparently ... (Score:2, Informative)
Anyhow, I've been running Vista RC1 since it was released (and the beta before that) and never had a problem with the sleep function. Other problems, yes, but none with sleep and none so bad I'd complain about them (mostly my preferences vs. Microsoft's, predictable stuff like that).
In fact, I was just telling my wife the other day (she just melts when I talk sweet to her like this) that the sleep/hibernat
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:2)
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: (Score:2)
Re:Why are you even putting it in sleep mode (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
That method wastes a fair amount of power. I prefer the way I go now: I close the lid, the computer hibernates, on the morning, I open & press the power button, finds & plugs in the mouse and power, say good morning on so on... and then the laptop is good to go.
Also, stuffing the laptop in a bag without powerdown would make it rather hot?
I wish I could do this with my main computer, but alas,
Re: (Score:2)
You talk to your computer? Man, you need to get laid, lol.
Re:Why are you even putting it in sleep mode (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Sometimes you just have to hold a company to its promises. If the OS is released, it is being installed on computers that will be sold for this Christmas. If there are bugs that affect simple operations it is a serious problem.
Re:Slashdot Ramps Up the Vista FUD (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
BTW, it's funny how the parent is flamebait, while replacing a few words makes you insightful. Moderators, make up your mind.
Re: (Score:2)