Standby/sleep in Windows--Fatal flaw

[The Viking]

I close the lid. Seconds later, the reassuring "snore" is visible on the front. But when I get home, the laptop is in my bag, fans whirring frantically, causing undue stress to my hardware and myself. In my view, the point to standby/sleep requires that it does not wake itself up, running the battery down, and possibly damaging my laptop.

Anyone else have this issue? Any suggestions? It's only happening in Windoze, Tiger sleeps like a baby.

[diamondsw]

Not much of a data point, but the one time I put my MacBook Pro to sleep in Windows, I had no problems.

[organik]

just happened to me this evening.

scared the hell out of me - I put it in standy, closed the lid, seemed to stay in standby - goes into my backpack for a 35 min car ride to work. I get there, take it out, and it's almost too hot to touch - in fact I believe it got so hot it powered off. To reiterate - it was REALLY F&#$N HOT!!!!

From now on no sleepy time in XP until this is resolved. OS X of course no problem.

[eklynx]

use Hibernation. it coppies RAM to the hard drive and fully powers off. enable it in the power management control panel.


Yes, mac users, you know it as safe sleep, but if i remember correctly, windows had it implemented first, so i wont say "it's the windows equivilent of".

[The Viking]

Hmm... I get Turn Off, Restart, and Standby.

Oh! Here's how to turn on Hibernate as an option:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/mobility/getstarted/hibernate.mspx

Man, I've been out of the Windows game too long. From a Win2K MCSE to a WinXP noob in just a few short (but delightful) years of using Mac exclusively.

[nextrance]

Why is everyone so surprised that the first beta of a product isn't perfect?

Word to the wise: With XOM you wouldn't even have video acceleration. Apple did you a huge favor with BootCamp.. so just shut down the Windows you wouldn't be running otherwise and wait for them to get around to it.

[FrostyFire]

You have to enable hibernation first.

Right click on the desktop > screen saver > Power... > Hiberate tab > Enable Hibernation.

[The Viking]

Nextrance, I appreciate your forgiving attitude toward Boot Camp, but this is not me begging Apple to fix it. This is a place for tips/workarounds/fixes, and finding solutions & alternatives based on shared knowledge. Your post just brings down the signal/noise ratio, so please keep it on topic here.

Haven't dared to test the Hibernate option yet, so for now I am shutting down. It obviously senses that the lid is closed, so that sensor must be running and connected to Windows somehow. Mac OS checks that sensor, and shuts itself back down after a few seconds if something wakes it up, and I wonder if there is some hidden Power Option that I'm not aware of that can fix this.

[FrostyFire]

Well if anyone has noticed the sleep function in OSX doesn't work that well either!

[genede]

I'm also running into problems with sleep on a 20" iMac. In fact, none of the power management features are working. Idle sensing seems to have a problem. The screen saver will only come on if I engage preview, and turning off monitor, spinning down the hard drive, and going to sleep automatically after a set length of idle time aren't working. Frankly, all of this I can live with. :) You can still put the machine into sleep or hibernation manually, which is fine with me.

The real problems begin when you try to come out of sleep or hibernation. In the first case, the "I'm asleep" light turns off, the hard drive spins up, the fans come on, but the monitor stays dark. The machine won't respond to pings either, so I suspect it's fully hanged. With hibernation, it gets all the way through the "Resuming Windows" bar and then hangs there as well. Luckily, Windows gives you the option of abandoning the saved state the next time you try to boot.

For sake of comparison, all the power management features are working for me on the Mac Mini. I suspected video drivers, but Windows won't let you put the machine to sleep if you uninstall them, for whatever reason. I haven't had much opportunity to delve deeper.

Something that I find a little confusing is that applications such as PowerOff 3.0 can tell the machine to turn off its monitor. The iMac does so, but then immediately turns it right back on again, less than a second later.

Before anyone feels that I'm being mean to Apple (*grin*) I do appreciate the work they did in getting the firmware updates out there so quickly and getting Windows drivers in place. That is really cool. But if anyone comes up with a workaround for these power management issues, it would be very helpful. I'd like to use the iMac as my main machine, which means leaving it on so scheduled tasks can happen while I'm sleeping. But if I can't even turn off the monitor, it's a bit of a bummer.

Thanks! :)

[oallostavros]

I'm having the same problem as TheViking and Organik. I thought it was going to explode. Guess I have to turn the thing off before closing my lid from now on.



Also, when I push the power button, I only get the options of Standby, Turn off, and Restart. How do you get Hibernate to appear as an option?

[bdj21ya]

I'm having the same problem as TheViking and Organik. I thought it was going to explode. Guess I have to turn the thing off before closing my lid from now on.



Also, when I push the power button, I only get the options of Standby, Turn off, and Restart. How do you get Hibernate to appear as an option?

You can change it in the control panel, power settings, so that it hibernates when you close the screen (instead of sleeping)--problem solved (though you have to first enable hibernation in a separate tab of the power settings). You could also make hibernation the default when you hit the power button if you prefer. Finally, you can hold shift when the options come up and Hibernate will appear in place of Sleep.

[oallostavros]

Thanks for the suggestions. I've actually already done all this though. Still, I have no option for hibernate when I push the power button.

Any other ideas?



You can change it in the control panel, power settings, so that it hibernates when you close the screen (instead of sleeping)--problem solved (though you have to first enable hibernation in a separate tab of the power settings). You could also make hibernation the default when you hit the power button if you prefer. Finally, you can hold shift when the options come up and Hibernate will appear in place of Sleep.

[bdj21ya]

Have you already turned on hibernation in the obscure tab of the control panel?

[oallostavros]

Yes, I've done that already.

[JamesB]

I'm having a similar problem with sleep, but not quite the same...

My macbook will never go to sleep if I close the lid.

However, if I put it to sleep with the power button and then close the lid, it wakes back up!

Also, after minimal testing*, it doesn't seem to go to sleep after 2 minutes of idle on battery like I told it to...maybe I wasn't giving it enough time though, we'll see. I was hoping to tell it to go to sleep after 1 min on battery so that if she did close the lid it would just go to sleep on its own...that didn't seem to work.

Lastly, shouldn't I get a drive selection menu when turning the MacBook on now? It just goes straight to XP...am I missing something? I know I didn't install XP on the OS X partition.


* - ok, it's my wife's MacBook....I just installed XP last night and she had to take it with her this morning...going to mess with it more this evening if she doesn't kill me first.

[Elwin23]

JamesB: try booting it while pushing the ALT button... menu to choose should come up (and in your control panel, there's a new icon called startup disk, you can choose what system to boot up automaticly, OSX has the same)

Finally, all these sleep problems are talked over bigtime in the sticky topic, my macbook slept through the night (or something) topic....
im one of the few there that still have the problem with all the new bootcamp driver versions :( still using hibernation, sometimes it won't even go into hibernation (while i have 2GB of memory in it, pretty strange) :(

[JamesB]

Thanks for the tip Elwin....but my wife decided XP wasn't her thing anymore... :) She's sticking with OS X I guess.

Regarding the 2gig hibernation problem, I believe that's an issue with XP itself and not the macbook. You may want to google the microsoft knowledge base articles, I think there's a patch out there that fixes the hibernation problem. I had the same problem with my dell laptop with 2gigs of ram a while back and fixed it with a patch from Microsoft.