techMonday, November 28, 2005
A problem with Hibernation
I like the Hibernate feature on my laptop (they all have it). It loads the contents of memory onto the hard drive before shutting down so that the next time you power up, the data is copied back into memory and you resume exactly where you left off - no need for all the OS and all the other programs to reload. It's much faster than doing a full boot.
It's similar to the Suspend feature, except that suspend doesn't fully power down, just shuts down most of the hardware and keeps power supplied to the memory so that it doesn't need to be copied to the hard drive (RAM is volatile memory which means that when it looses power, the contents are lost - so stuff has to be written to the hard drive if you don't want to loose it when powering down). The problem with suspend is that it is still running the battery down, if at a much slower rate. A laptop can be left in hibernate mode for weeks without running the battery down at all.
I set my power button to initiate hibernation mode instead of shutting down. I like this setup because it's easy for the power button to get hit accidentally - especially with little kids running around. If it goes into hibernation, nothing will be lost (like if I'm working in a spreadsheet or image editor or something).
And my laptop automatically powers up when the lid is opened if it's in hibernation.
The only problem with this is that [most popular operating system] sucks and needs a fresh reboot every now and then. This isn't much of a problem as far as hibernation is concerned though, since it's a simple matter to do a full reboot from the shutdown menu at any time.
Though a problem does arise, I found out, if you add some RAM while in hibernation. This is no problem from a hardware perspective because the laptop is fully powered down. You could even pull the battery if necessary. Increasing the RAM size, however, is an action not anticipated by the folks who designed the hibernation feature of [the popular operating system]. When I rebooted the system and it began the restore from hibernation procedure (copying the contents from the hard drive back to the memory), it reached the end of the progress meter and promptly locked up. I had to reboot and it gave me a menu to choose whether to try to resume from hibernation or to do a full boot. I tried the hibernation restore again, and it locked up again. At this point, I felt a small spark of panic ("Oh no, maybe I really messed it up"), but then I did a full reboot and everything was fine - it was correctly reporting the memory size, and I haven't had any memory related problems since.
A change in RAM size is simply not a possibility that is anticipated by the OS.
It's similar to the Suspend feature, except that suspend doesn't fully power down, just shuts down most of the hardware and keeps power supplied to the memory so that it doesn't need to be copied to the hard drive (RAM is volatile memory which means that when it looses power, the contents are lost - so stuff has to be written to the hard drive if you don't want to loose it when powering down). The problem with suspend is that it is still running the battery down, if at a much slower rate. A laptop can be left in hibernate mode for weeks without running the battery down at all.
I set my power button to initiate hibernation mode instead of shutting down. I like this setup because it's easy for the power button to get hit accidentally - especially with little kids running around. If it goes into hibernation, nothing will be lost (like if I'm working in a spreadsheet or image editor or something).
And my laptop automatically powers up when the lid is opened if it's in hibernation.
The only problem with this is that [most popular operating system] sucks and needs a fresh reboot every now and then. This isn't much of a problem as far as hibernation is concerned though, since it's a simple matter to do a full reboot from the shutdown menu at any time.
Though a problem does arise, I found out, if you add some RAM while in hibernation. This is no problem from a hardware perspective because the laptop is fully powered down. You could even pull the battery if necessary. Increasing the RAM size, however, is an action not anticipated by the folks who designed the hibernation feature of [the popular operating system]. When I rebooted the system and it began the restore from hibernation procedure (copying the contents from the hard drive back to the memory), it reached the end of the progress meter and promptly locked up. I had to reboot and it gave me a menu to choose whether to try to resume from hibernation or to do a full boot. I tried the hibernation restore again, and it locked up again. At this point, I felt a small spark of panic ("Oh no, maybe I really messed it up"), but then I did a full reboot and everything was fine - it was correctly reporting the memory size, and I haven't had any memory related problems since.
A change in RAM size is simply not a possibility that is anticipated by the OS.
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Sony figured out this really cool thing with hibernation mode. About 5 months after you buy a new Sony Vaio and 5 days before finals your computer goes into hibernation mode but then it doesn't come back out. So you have to hold the power button and force it to turn off and then reboot. After doing that for a couple does the power button won't work so you have to remove the battery to get it to come out. The that doesn't work so you have to send it back to sony so they can replace the hard drive only to find that when you get it back the motherboard is defective. Now thats why I like Hibernation mode.
I feel your pain on the Sony hibernation issue. Stupid Sony. Stupid Hibernation. Why don't they stick to making video games and music players.
Oh, I thought that the apple notebooks were the only ones that required you to pull the battery in order to shut it down. I guess that Sony has the battery pulling technology now too.
But it sounds like your computer might have hung while it was entering hibernation mode because if it had a problem while waking from hibernation, it shouldn't be that hard to bypass the hibernation and do a full boot. But computers are crazy, unpredictable things so who knows.
I've seen some drivers that prevent a computer from going into Stand-by mode.
And I've had some problems with Internet access over a wireless network connection after coming out of hibernation - the computer was in range of the router when entering hibernation as well as when waking from hibernation, the network connection seemed to be working fine (I could access the router's settings through it), but even after refreshing (and fully disconnecting and reconnecting to the network) the Internet was entirely inaccessible. Other people on the same network had absolutely no problems accessing the net. So I did a full reboot and it worked fine. Stupid Windows XP. Oh well, it's better than what would have happened in Windows 98 - I would have tried to check the network settings and windows would have told me that I HAD to reboot for the changes to take effect.
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Oh, I thought that the apple notebooks were the only ones that required you to pull the battery in order to shut it down. I guess that Sony has the battery pulling technology now too.
But it sounds like your computer might have hung while it was entering hibernation mode because if it had a problem while waking from hibernation, it shouldn't be that hard to bypass the hibernation and do a full boot. But computers are crazy, unpredictable things so who knows.
I've seen some drivers that prevent a computer from going into Stand-by mode.
And I've had some problems with Internet access over a wireless network connection after coming out of hibernation - the computer was in range of the router when entering hibernation as well as when waking from hibernation, the network connection seemed to be working fine (I could access the router's settings through it), but even after refreshing (and fully disconnecting and reconnecting to the network) the Internet was entirely inaccessible. Other people on the same network had absolutely no problems accessing the net. So I did a full reboot and it worked fine. Stupid Windows XP. Oh well, it's better than what would have happened in Windows 98 - I would have tried to check the network settings and windows would have told me that I HAD to reboot for the changes to take effect.
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