I think Macs also sleep very well. I knew a guy who would never shut down his macbook. He would just slam the lid and throw it in his bag. :P

ACPI on liux is still flaky – depending on hardware and distro you are using it gives you varied results.

My laptop was Linux only, but we’ve got some really neat-o exam software that lets us take our essay exams on our computers. Which is really nice, but guess what? Windows only and won’t run in a VM. So I added Windows for the first time. It works ok, the one thing it does really well is sleep. When it goes to sleep, it can go days (4 or 5, I tested) before running out of juice. When I open it up and hit power it snaps on immediately. I only wish Linux slept as well.

I don’t know if most laptops sleep that well – I doubt it – but given mine does, I’ve never tried hibernating – as long as I use my computer every 4-5 days, hibernation really couldn’t help much. I’ve never wanted to though, given I gave Windows only 5gb of space on my hd to work with, and I have 1.5 gb of ram – the hiberfil.sys would take up 30% of the total partition!

PS – the monkey tech support would probably do a lot better than some commercial tech support lines out there. Have you ever called the consumer (not business) support line for Dell? I’m not against outsourcing, so long as quality stays consistent, but its clear many of these “tech support” people are really only capable of reading off a screen!