Personally, I believe that hibernation is for bears – I keep my machines on 24-7 and I like it this way. But some people do like to hibernate their laptops. From my email:
I’ve been having another problem with my laptop; som times when it won’t let me hibernate, then a message pops up that there isn’t suffient memory (?) to compete the API. Do you know why that happens, and how it can be fixed?
Yes, my users are having issues with “suffient” memories, and “compete” with their API’s. There is really nothing I can do about that. I mean, when I say “please writhe down the error message” I actually mean write it down as it happens, not “memorize one or two buzzwords and make the rest up”. I really don’t know how to be clearer than that.
For the record, the actual error message was:
Insufficient System Resources Exist to Complete the API.
I know this, because Google told me. You see, when I plugged in that thing that my user sent me into the search box, Google was like “did you mean that other thing that actually makes sense?”. Anyone wants to venture a guess how did “memory” get into that email?
But I digress. It turns out that SP2 has b0rked the power management kernel module in XP. Fortunately, you wouldn’t know this unless you regularly hibernate your machine, and you have over 1 GB of RAM. This can be easily solved by downloading a patch from Microsoft.
I’m always impressed by my arcane ability to solve other people’s issues by typing them into the Googles. Seriously, if I could teach monkeys to Google I would have like the most awesome support department on the planet. They would like all be wearing matching hats, eating bananas and answering tech support calls. I would walk in and be like “What’s up monkeys?” and they would be like “[monkey.wav]” (yeah, I don’t know what is the proper Onomatopoeia for the monkey sound, so you supply the wav file).
Then again, monkeys are not very good at critical thinking and problem analysis and quick to start throwing shit around when things go wrong…
Actually, so are most of the people I know… So I guess it probably wouldn’t make a difference. :P
Anyway, I digress. I wonder why this was not pushed down to users via Automatic Updates. Not critical enough? Or perhaps MS just doesn’t give a flying fuck.
[tags]insufficient resources, hibernation, windows xp, win xp, sp2[/tags]
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!
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.