The Richter Scale^®

As I travel far too much (e.g. New York last week for the New York International Gift Fair and client meetings, Washington DC this week for a deposition in a patent case I’m working on), I rely heavily on my notebook computer. And more importantly, being able to quickly access my desktop as well as shut down my notebook, with the work state saved.

Under Windows XP (as well as previous Microsoft operating systems) there are two ways to save the state of the system so you can quickly go back to that state when you turn on the computer - standby and hibernate. Standby tends to drain the battery over time because it keep power going to memory so that you don’t lose your data, but getting in and out of standby is rather fast - typically a matter of seconds.

Hibernate is where the memory of your system is saved to a file on your hard disk, and then the system powers down. Pressing the power button lets the computer boot up, and when it sees an active hibernation file, it restores the system memory and state from that. This may take up to a minute each way (going into hibernation and coming out), but is still a lot faster than the typical 2-4 minute system boot and shutdown one experiences with Windows XP. It’s great for notebooks and desktop systems alike.

That’s when it works.

Turns out that for at least three years there has been a problem with Windows XP and hibernation on systems with more than 1GB of memory - an amount of memory that is becoming increasingly common these days.

What happens is that if memory has become fragmented enough (i.e. you run a bunch of applications that are memory intensive), then, when you attempt to enter hibernation, the screen blanks, indicates it is going into hibernation, but then flash and returns to your Windows display, upon which you get an error in a pop-up bubble at the right end of the system tray which says: Insufficient system resources exist to complete the API.

At this point the system will no longer let you get into hibernation (although standby still works, at least until your standby has timed out and tries to go into hibernation on its own, at which point you may be carrying a fully powered notebook computer in your bag which you think is standing by but is instead draining your battery and possibly overheating).

Your only recourse when the hibernation crash occurs is to reboot the system.

My old S-series Sony VAIO notebook had exactly 1GB and I never had a problem. My new Sony VAIO TX-690P has 1.5GB and the problem is consistent whenever I seem to run Adobe Photoshop CS2 and/or Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 in addition to my e-mail software (Eudora 5.1) and various Microsoft Office applications (e.g. Word, Excel). If after a reboot I only run e-mail and Office programs (in moderation), I can successfully hibernate. However as soon as I then also need to edit an image in Photoshop or a web page in Dreamweaver, I am pretty much hosed - hibernation will produce the error I indicated above.

Here’s the irony - Microsoft has been aware of the issue for at least three years, and even has a fix out for the original Windows XP, but that fix will not work on XP systems upgraded to Service Pack 1 or Service Pack 2 (all new XP-based systems ship with SP2). And there’s some question as to how well the fix actually worked on older systems.

There’s an extensive thread in Microsoft’s Community Forum about this this issue, with people owning Dell, HP, and other brands of systems all experiencing the same problem. The thread closes with a gentleman who got a suggestion from Microsoft that to resolve this hibernation issue, he should tell XP to not use more than 1GB of system memory.

That’s just bizarre in my opinion. We spend good money to get as much memory as we can in our computers, and here Windows XP won’t support more than 1GB if you want to hibernate? Ridiculous.

And apparently computer makers are either not informed, passing the buck, or unable to have Microsoft make it a priority to fix this bug, which from my perspective is a serious detriment to portable computing.

Wasn’t stability and the ability to run multiple programs without causing problems the reason we all switched from DOS to Windows in the first place?

I wonder if this problem is solved in Microsoft’s forthcoming Vista operating system (not that I think Vista will run well on many current generation notebooks). Wouldn’t it be a hoot if they didn’t fix this in Vista? Oops.