have you disabled and reenabled after a scandisk the hibernate file and the swap file of windows vista ? if the problem is a bad sector in hibernate file then this could resolve it

I might have come along late to this discssion but how have you determined that the problem is not hardware? It sure sounds like a hardware problem. I had an early MacBook Pro that randomly restarted itself. I didn’t assume it was software for more than a few hours because the problem was truly random with no pattern that I could discern.

I know that Vista has less of a reputation for sleep reliability than OS X but still it seems to me that random problems that start without any software changes point to hardware issues.

We’re used to thinking problems are somebody’s fault in something manufactured (as opposed to the snow covering my car that you Texas boys don’t have to deal with). We’re also used to dividing up the teams in ways that are no longer accurate especially in computing. Used to be the IBM software guys would blame the hardware, and the hardware guys would say it’s a software problem.

Now the team is no longer parts of a company, they are teams that stretch across companies. I certainly know less about this than you who work in IT, but the results are dependent on people around the world these days, in companies that do their part. Microsoft decided they want to be the center of the software action, and get disproportionate blame because they are coordinating the teams in other companies as well by the structure they provide. Except that, as Josh points out, Intel has their role at the center. There’s no center, really; more like motion that everyone is part of.

And unfortunately that points to how complex troubleshooting it all is. Could be this, could be that. For starters.

My experience with Apple isn’t much better, fwiw. My experience is also that James is pretty insightful, and that Josh is about the most responsive software company I’ve ever dealt with. But Microsoft wrote most of the software on James’ computer, and gets to hear most about James’ problems with it.

Bashing Vista? James has been ecstatic with computer (software, hardware), was one of the earliest of early adopters of Vista beta, loves to show how cool his stuff is, and is reporting on his perceptions of the conversation of this set of problems. He’s steered more biz to Microsoft than their average marketing exec. Partly by reporting on his experiences and problems, as well as pleasures.

When I used to work for the big telco, users blamed us, they blamed Microsoft, or they blamed Darth Vader. (The voice actor for DV was James Earl Jones, and he was a spokesman from the Bell Atlantic days.)

When it isn’t working, most users don’t care. They just want it fixed. They don’t want to wait until Monday let alone next week. If a Mac user isn’t experiencing it (and given they are 5% of the market, problems don’t echo as loudly, even when a fair number of users are experiencing the issue), then they want you to be more like a Mac.

The bottom line is that to end users, the vast mojority of whom are trying to get to http://www.girlygirlygirls.com/, it just needs to be like a toaster. Put your bread in once, and if it’s too dark, adjust, pop in bread again, and if it’s too light, adjust once more, and then… Ah! Nirvana. (At least until the toaster dies.)

Yes, I know a computer is vastly more complex than a toaster. But the popular media and news outlets have convinced us it can be that easy. And in the always-on, give-it-to-me-yesterday world that we live in, we want it. Nope, sorry, we NEED it!

Happy New Year everyone!

Woadan

Meh, maybe you ought to look and see how widespread Intel stacks are. There’s more Intel CPU/Video/Network stacks in operation right now than Windows Vista. And guess what, I’ve had problems with XP resuming from standby every now and then too.

In fact, my HP2710P has been running flawlessly as well and only recently I’ve been experiencing infrequent bluescreens since popping in a Verizon EVDO card if I leave it in while I put it in standby. Maybe that’s Vista’s fault too. Maybe it’s Vista’s fault that my hinge is loose. Call it sandbagging, call it whatever you want. I call it being rational.

Oh and James, “bash Vista” were your words before I used them.

Josh is also sandbagging. Given how widespread the sleep of death problem is across a number of different laptops, it’s entirely fair to suspect the common element in these situations, which is, unfortunately, Vista.

I completely understand Josh’s reasoning as well, but I think there’s a perception management issue that’s worth noting. While we and most of our readers are what I’d generally classify as “tech saavy”, the majority of consumers are going to perceive this type of problem as a Microsoft issue. They’re not going to zero in on the component manufacturers and look for solutions in the drivers. They’re simply going to get fed up because “Vista is causing the issue”. I’m not saying that Vista itself is the problem here, but the perception of the consumer is going to be that it is. That’s a totally different issue than the technical problem of course, but it’s no less of an challenge in my book.

Just to keep this from a full on Vista bitch fest- I have had a HP TC4400 w/ Vista for about 6 months now- I use the dock and each day I dock it at the end of the day, press power and it goes to sleep, in the morning it wakes up fine. I also have 2 other vista laptops that run flawlessly. I hope you can get your problem resolved- but I think the majority of users are doing fine.. it is the small percentage of those who have issues who make the most noise.

Josh, I understand what you’re saying, believe me. I don’t intend to “bash Vista”, I am simply reporting what my system began to do with no provocation. I know that given my experience with Windows I will eventually resolve this, with or without MS help. What drives me to report this stuff is how the many, many users who don’t have that ability to resolve something like this who will be screwed when they run into problems like this. Like it or not the OS controls the environment (or should) and to the end-user like those I just mentioned it doesn’t matter if a driver suddenly exhibited problems or the like. There is no logic behind a system that shut down fine one night and then had a consistent problem the next morning, no matter how you slice it.

I have a 2710p also, and I have it set to go to sleep after inactivity so it goes to sleep at least 8 times per day. I have not had this problem. The only sleep problem I have is when it falls asleep in portrait mode it re-awakes in landscape. I have to hit the little rotate button on the side to fix it everytime.

James, Except that it is not an operating system’s job (nor within its power) to make sure that each component of the system does its job properly. An operating system’s job is to make it so that software has a unified API for interacting with the various hardware devices. Mac OSX can’t keep the video card or network card from bombing a machine any more than Windows can.

What you are expecting Windows to do *is* theoretically possible using the same kind of techniques that Microsoft .NET or Java uses to provide a fully managed environment. The only problems are 1) no hardware maker in their right minds would go along with it and 2) it would be slow as balls.

You closed your last post about this by saying “Thanks for nothing, Vista”. How about “thanks for providing an automatic feature that reports these errors so that people at Microsoft can find and fix bugs that are sometimes Microsoft’s fault and sometimes other software or hardware makers’ faults.”

It just really bugs me that you and alot of other bloggers jump on the trash Vista bandwagon when you even admit that you don’t know if Vista is really the problem – all without giving any credit for the great lengths Microsoft is going to to make these problems go away. Don’t think for a second that many of those mysterious Windows updates that suddenly make things like sleep/resume work better are all Windows bugs that were fixed. There are lots of:

if ( crappyDriverInstalled )
FixStackCorruption();

Workarounds floating around just to make end users happy because driver makers are not always so quick to fix problems because they know users will just play it safe and blame Vista.

GoodThings2Life, good points about the power management and something I had meant to do but forgot. I have now turned off PM for the 7 USB root hubs showing in Device Manager and the two network devices as well. Any of these could easily be the culprits who are waking the computer in the night and causing a crash so here’s hoping. Thanks!

To answer the question: In the years I used a laptop with Win 2K and Windows XP I had sometimes to adapt usage of sleep/hibernate to some idiosyncracies of the lappy in question, but overall I never bothered to do a reinstall because things mostly worked.

On my (nearing 9 months old now) Vista Sony I am considering doing a reinstall, not because of the sleep problems outlined above (I think those problems are a bug in Vista, personally) but because of intermittent BSODs, which is a definite downscale in quality from W2K and XP.

It’s a shame, because Vista, Office 2007 and particularly OneNote 2007 have been real improvements for my working otherwise.

I have found, over the years, that vendors like HP and Gateway, etc. are not in a very good habit of keeping drivers posted on their site up to date.

Many of the Dell’s where I work have also started randomly blue-screening on people, and I was able to track down that a Windows Update broke some driver compatibility. The solution? Update ALL drivers regardless of whether they were previously working. I agree with Ed– video is the biggest culprit, but I’ve seen a lot of Intel chipset drivers cause this type of issue as well as network drivers.

I use http://www.driveragent.com for checking to see if new drivers are needed. You have to be careful about sound drivers since even though they may use the same chipset for sound, that chipset driver is heavily customized for each vendor. Otherwise, most things are generally pretty accurate. Just be aware that I’ve also seen Intel chipset drivers skip installation on IDE/SATA controllers and USB controllers, so you may have to manually update those from Device Manager.

OK, last comment, though I’m sure you’ve seen it before– in Device Manager, verify that the Power Management settings for your network/mobile devices are unchecked and do the same for USB Root Hubs. This has always been a huge “sleep” breaker in my experience.

In any case, good luck on resolving your issues. I look forward to hearing the final solution.

The depressing thing for me is that my old Sony laptop with XP had the odd glitch with sleep/hibernations, but the new one with Vista seems to have many more, particularly Sleep of Death. I’ve only had Insomnia happen a couple of times, but now I am paranoid so on the move I always try to make the time to wait until the hibernate has switched power off, because I don’t want my laptop bag to catch fire…

Now that I think about it, the last time I actually had to re-install an OS due to corruption was about 6 years ago. My w…uh, someone turned off my laptop without shutting Windows 2000 down properly. It wouldn’t boot up at all, so I had to re-install it. Every other installation of Windows I’ve done since then has been “voluntary.”

Strange, huh?

I’ve commented at length in other posts here about my Vista problems — mostly BSODs. I never did find out what the culprit was, but I suspect it was either video or wireless adapter driver related. At first, I used to get BSODs just at shutdown. Later, it started happening upon waking from Sleep.

I ended up replacing Vista on my laptop with XP (voluntarily, of course). Over the weekend, however, I installed Vista in a VM on my laptop — just for grins, mostly, but also to keep up with the “technology.” I’m using VMWare 6 and haven’t had any problems so far in the very short time I’ve been using it.

One obvious, but probably unhelpful, suggestion would be not to use Sleep — just do a complete shutdown, especially if it’s in the dock.