Hibernation is my favourite power saving method – I press my power button and my computer powers down. I press it again and it starts up again, but with everything exactly the way I left it. Sleep never gave me the same satisfaction of reducing my power usage. But Windows XP gave me troubles with this upgraded machine of mine. I’d press the power button, Windows will proclaim it’s about to hibernate, but everything goes horribly wrong, the screen cuts out, comes back in, with a nice little balloon telling me
Windows - System Error: Insufficient system resources exist to complete the API.
How can their be insufficient resources? I have 220GB+ free on my hard drive! The system logs tell me nothing either.
Well, it appears that Windows does have troubles from time-to-time when your RAM exceeds 1GB. Go to the Knowledge Base article 909095 and download the hot fix patch there (you won’t find it in Windows Update). The problem should now be fixed.
Excellent.
[Tip: Tales from the Crypto]
The more information in the KB article says:
To prepare the computer to hibernate, the Windows kernel power manager requires a block of contiguous memory. The size of this contiguous memory is proportional to the number of physical memory regions that the computer is using. A computer that uses lots of RAM is likely to use more physical memory regions when the computer prepares to hibernate. Therefore, a larger amount of contiguous memory is required to prepare the computer to hibernate.
Additionally, the number of physical memory regions varies according to the programs, services, and device drivers that the computer uses. Therefore, the hibernate feature occasionally fails.
That still doesn’t explain why it failed on my machine… oh well.
