From the tablet today:
Yes, oh, yes it was…
The problem here, from my perspective, is that when the tablet is plugged into a power supply, it does not go to sleep properly. I can put it to sleep, and then connect it to charge the battery, but a few hours later, it will just be off, and when I turn it back on, I get the “Resuming Windows” screen, and it takes much longer to re-start than when it wakes up from being in sleep mode.
I’ve sort of grown resigned to this. every now and then, though, it pops up an actual error message (generally “Windows Host Process experienced an error and had to close” or something similarly helpful), and today, I got the report you see in the screen capture.
I could be wrong but it sounds like your computer is hibernating after being in sleep mode for so long. It does this probably because of the default power saving settings. On your desktop, right click, go to Properties, then to the Screen Saver tab, and hit the Power… button. My guess is that the current setting tells your tablet to hibernate after 1 or 2 hours of inactivity while it’s plugged in. You can customize your settings from here. Hope this helps 🙂
One thing about your particular laptop is that Lenovo has their own little “helpful” applet with power management settings that (if I remember correctly) don’t necessarily match up to what you’ve selected in Windows, so there are two places that things might be set. I don’t know which of them overrides the other or how they interact, so I just make sure they’re the same.
Also, make sure you run the ThinkVantage System Update thing, because there are a bunch of power-related fixes in there (BIOS, driver, hotfix, and otherwise) that you don’t get through regular Windows Update.
My ThinkPad had a period where it worked flawlessly with sleep, a period where it was terribly unreliable, and now it’s back to pretty much always working right.
This reminds me of a recent victory I scored over my HP / Intel / Vista POS laptop (which I would never have bought but got free at work). I installed the famous Fritz computer chess program (which is the world’s best chess analysis engine and only costs $10 if you get one of the older versions).
Fritz has a “infinite analysis” mode where it takes the current position and just keeps analyzing it deeper and deeper. You use this to analyze a game played in the past; Fritz will find all the good moves. (Fritz can beat any human player.) The problem was that the laptop overheated and crashed after about 20 minutes.
In the old days I’d have solved this by clocking the CPU down or extending the CAS times on the DRAM. But none of that is available nowadays. Finally, after a gap of some months, I figured out that the way to stop overheating was to crank down the “maximum CPU utilization” in the power controls.
I now have had a laptop cut down to 50% for two weeks and the only thing I’ve noticed is that it doesn’t crash as much now. The speed is just fine because most of the time, when I’m waiting for my computer, it’s disk access times that keep it slow, not CPU.
Get Linux!
I’m a huge fan of Linux — having used it almost exclusively since 1998 — but even I wouldn’t claim that the correct solution to power-management issues is to “Get Linux”. If anything, power management is one of the few areas in which Linux hardware support hasn’t yet caught up to Windows.
Whoever said hibernate is probably giving you problems may be right. I have a Dell Inspiron with SATA and there was a problem with the computer giving BSODs when I came out of hibernate…come to find out there is a ton of problems with that feature (esp. with SATA) and it was causing the crashes.
I just stopped using hibernate mode and haven’t had a problem sense.