Windows 7

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

They're called different things. Sleep/Standby has to be supported by your BIOS(S3). RAM is kept powered. Hibernate is an OS feature, there should be no issue with drivers/bios as it's just like shutting down. Content from RAM is saved in a hibernate file on hard disk, you can lose power and your data is still safe.

That's why I said "sleep" and not "hibernate" - because they are different things.

And there are a lot of different levels of sleep, which includes different device states, performance states, processor states, etc. Wikipedia explains it in more detail.

It's so complex that it's no wonder it doesn't always work perfectly. For instance, when I changed my BIOS to S3 only, I found that I could wake my PC up with a PS2 keyboard. However, with a USB keyboard, it was also turned off, and so couldn't wake the machine. I had to make changes to the registry in order to be able to wake up the machine with a USB keyboard.

 

[vazel]

The cpu and performance states talked about there are for C1, C1E, Speedstep, etc. while the PC is on. What causes trouble with sleep are drivers or Windows itself. I guess some drivers don't handle most everything around them being turned off and then on again too well.

 

[vazel]

Found out why my PC won't go to sleep. It's my Audigy 2. I'm using the unofficial Audigy support pack 3.1 driver package for Windows 7. It looks like it's the dts encoding feature it's always sending out a dts stream.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Other than a quirk in the Gigabyte BIOS/58xx combo, Sleep has worked perfectly ever since I upgrade to Vista when it launched. And Win7 sleep worked even with that quirk. Luckily I only had to live with that problem for a couple weeks before I installed Win7.

I suspect with the new Gigabyte BIOS, sleep would probably work just peachy in Vista if I went back now as it's fixed a few quirks with the 58xx I had.

Windows XP on the other hand was absolutely horrible with regards to sleep...

Regards,
SB

 

[swaaye]

Found out why my PC won't go to sleep. It's my Audigy 2. I'm using the unofficial Audigy support pack 3.1 driver package for Windows 7. It looks like it's the dts encoding feature it's always sending out a dts stream.

I'm running those drivers on my comp and no problems. I don't use DTS anything though.

 

[swaaye]

Windows XP on the other hand was absolutely horrible with regards to sleep..

I think that standby/suspend support on motherboards varies wildly in buggyness. I actually haven't had problems with XP's standby on most systems.

If XP has problems on a mobo it's likely that the mobo has some sort of issue itself, such as USB problems like with a 945G sys that I have to deal with at work. In XP it will standby irregularly, in Linux it will immediately re-awaken, and it all comes down to some sort of ACPI/USB issue because disabling USB fixes it up. Fun.

Linux is a real disaster when it comes to suspending, btw. I think that MS actively works around issues with manufacturers but of course Linux tries to go their own way and it's buggy as hell on some systems (even notebooks).

 

[vazel]

I'm running those drivers on my comp and no problems. I don't use DTS anything though.

Obviously if you don't have a dts stream constantly being encoded you're not going to have any issues... It's been an awesome feature for my HTPC activities.

 

[Davros]

that begs the question why would you want your pc to go to sleep if its encoding a dts stream

 

[hoom]

ZOMG, I just tried Sleep again & it worked!

I reset my BIOS after defaulting it the other day so its possible there was some strange setting there, or maybe one of the Netgear WLAN driver updates was the fix?

The real test is whether it works tonight when I get back from work though.

 

[vazel]

that begs the question why would you want your pc to go to sleep if its encoding a dts stream

I don't think you understand. It takes all the audio of my PC and encodes it into a dts stream for my receiver. It's an output feature of the soundcard that is on all the time. Like how nforce2 motherboards would output Dolby Digital. I had one of those motherboards btw and it went to sleep just fine. This is the only way I can get 5.1 in games otherwise it just outputs stereo PCM.

 

[Kaotik]

I'm having strange issues with sleeps etc aswell - as in, the machine won't automaticly go to sleep - in fact it won't even put my screensaver on or turn off the monitor, when it's supposed to.

that powercfg -requests revealed nothing, according to that there should be nothing preventing anything

 

[swaaye]

I don't think you understand. It takes all the audio of my PC and encodes it into a dts stream for my receiver. It's an output feature of the soundcard that is on all the time. Like how nforce2 motherboards would output Dolby Digital. I had one of those motherboards btw and it went to sleep just fine. This is the only way I can get 5.1 in games otherwise it just outputs stereo PCM.

Does your receiver have analog 5.1 input? I use that. It takes a few more wires lol but hey they're all out of sight anyway. Oh and you don't have another layer of lossy compression in there then either.

 

[Grall]

Hibernate is an OS feature, there should be no issue with drivers/bios as it's just like shutting down.

Well, in a perfect world that may be true.

I have had my old vista box refusing to hibernate intermittently; it saves RAM to disk, then shuts off, only to power back up immediately again.

There's no pattern to when it starts behaving like this, just that once it starts doing it, that vista OS install is essentially fscked from that point on where hibernate is concerned. It typically won't ever work again without re-installing the entire OS.

On my new i7 box I can't rely on hibernate because something with my hardware - probably the mobo - is causing performance issues or even hangs/BSODs if it's heavily loaded after starting up from a cold state. It's like the mobo literally has to heat up first before it becomes 100% reliable... Very strange. I have to boot the PC, let it run for a while (so it gets warm, probably), then do a reboot, and only after that will it run ok from then on. Putting it into hibernate and letting it cool off will make it unstable once more, prompting another reboot unless I want to risk it crashing on me.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I think that standby/suspend support on motherboards varies wildly in buggyness. I actually haven't had problems with XP's standby on most systems.

That's probably true, but in most of my experiences, MBs that have problems with sleep in XP don't have problems with sleep in Vista.

Every single board I've owned had problems properly going into sleep mode or coming out of sleep mode in XP, but worked flawlessly on Vista. Friends and business aquaintences usually had similar experiences. Of those that did have working sleep, it was almost always an OEM machine with no modifications.

I rarely found anyone with a build it yourself computer getting sleep to work reliably in XP. Which is completely the opposite of Vista. Haven't had enough people switch to Win7 yet to get a good idea of how that'll pan out. But don't expect MS has gone backwards with it.

Regards,
SB

 

[vazel]

That's funny from everything I've read in the past couple days of me trying to fix my issue mass problems with sleep didn't start until Vista/Win7. Never had an issue with XP across several builds and many reformats.

Does your receiver have analog 5.1 input? I use that. It takes a few more wires lol but hey they're all out of sight anyway. Oh and you don't have another layer of lossy compression in there then either.

I don't like wires. Plus I use the analog output for my headphones(headphones for my monitor receiver is for plasma). And it's nice to be able to use spdif passthrough when I want.

I have had my old vista box refusing to hibernate intermittently; it saves RAM to disk, then shuts off, only to power back up immediately again.

Run powercfg -devicequery wake_armed it will tell you which devices are allowed to wake Windows the most likely culprit is the NIC.

 

[eastmen]

7 and vista both boot roughly equally fast on my PC with a SSD. I haven't timed it with a stopwatch or anything, just going on general 'feel'. It's in the same ballpark, even though it'll probably differ somewhat.

Then again, Vista's boot-time did slow down considerably as the install aged, to the point it was much, much slower towards the end of life. And that install was only about 8 months old too; I dunno if I had some kind of weird quirk or whatever with my particular PC, but windows rot is definitely alive and well in 2009.

Most likely the ssd thats causing your problem. If it doesn't have trim it will slow down as its used. That is if your using the ssd when the problems happened.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631

 

[hoom]

Yay! Woke successfully from Sleep mode after the full day at work.
This is good times

powercfg -requests
powercfg -devicequery wake_armed

Now, why the fuck aren't these GUIized & available via the Control Panel???

There are far too many of these things that should be findable via the GUI with nice tooltips etc but they hide them away in command line where only a few geeks will ever know they exist.

 

[Simon F]

Having just had to replace my old XP laptop with a new Vista one, I'd really like to know if the Windows 7 networking works.

I've had problems with Vista spontaneously disconnecting wireless or even turning it off completely (and it only eventually realises this after a reboot) or with it failing to notice that I've plugged in the LAN cable. It is really annoying.

 

[hoom]

I've personally had no problems with W7 other than that I had to initially hunt down x64 drivers for my WLAN.

Doesn't mean that loads of other people don't have those same issues though.

Pretty sure that Vista SP1 or some other update was supposed to fix/improve networking issues?
I certainly know of lots of Vista users who seem to have interminable WLAN issues.

 

[Simon F]

Pretty sure that Vista SP1 or some other update was supposed to fix/improve networking issues?

Did the SP1 upgrade on day 1.

I certainly know of lots of Vista users who seem to have interminable WLAN issues.

On one instance it did state it was reporting the fault back to Microsoft so maybe it will get looked at.