by Prasanna Vignesh
9. March 2007 06:33
Windows Vista has a neat new feature for laptops called "hybrid
sleep". Actually, Windows Vista has a neat new feature for laptops
called sleep too, so I'm getting ahead of myself a bit.
Windows used to have a fairly simple hardware suspend command called
"standby". However, this operation took a while to execute (both
entering and exiting standby) and it was somewhat unreliable when
performed repeatedly, on certain hardware or with certain applications
running. Sleep is meant to alleviate these problems by just
serializing the current state into memory and then shutting down all
devices other than the RAM. With the OS state simmering in memory like
that, entering and exiting sleep is nearly instantaneous. However, the
dark side to all this is if there is a power outage while the computer
is in sleep, all of the unsaved data is lost (since it just existed in
memory). That's where hybrid sleep comes in.
Hybrid sleep saves the OS state into RAM, but it also writes it all
to the hard drive as well (sort of like hibernate does). This ensures
that even if power is lost, the data will remain. This all sounds like
a good idea, but in practice it's just as slow as standby was.
Now, laptops have batteries and most of them are configured to enter
hibernate when the battery dips below a certain level. This means that
unless the battery is physically removed, power to the RAM is never
unexpectedly cut. Thus, we don't really need the hybrid sleep feature. Unfortunately, giving hybrid sleep the pink slip is a little harder than it could be.
Step one, open up the power options setting from the control panel
and select the "Change plan settings" link below the selected power
plan.
Once in the resulting dialog, choose "Change advanced power settings".
Now you need to scroll through the miles and miles of options to find
the "Sleep" node. Expand this, and then the "Allow hybrid sleep" node
below it. You should see two options, "On battery" and "Plugged in".
Set both of these to "Off".
Once this is done, click "OK" and you should be all set! From now on,
whenever your laptop would normally go into "Sleep" - usually when the
lid is closed or when inactive for a certain time - it will enter full
sleep mode, rather than hybrid sleep. And when you go to awaken it
from its slumbers, it should be fully responsive within a second or two
of reactivation - as opposed to the 10-15 seconds after hybrid sleep.
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