Patch — Tag

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.

Neowin, NVNews have reported that a new patch has been sent out to testers fixing many, very annoying performance and reliability issues in Vista. Included in the fixes are the problems that drove me back to XP:

938979 Vista Performance and Reliability Pack
This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the performance and responsiveness for some scenarios and improves reliability of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are:

* Improves performance in resuming back to the desktop from the Photo and Windows Energy screensaver.
* Resolves an issue where some secured web pages using advanced security technologies may not get displayed in Internet Explorer on Windows Vista.
* Resolves an issue where a shared printer may not get installed if the printer is connected to a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 system and User Access Control is disabled on the Vista client.
* Resolves an issue where creating AVI files on Vista may get corrupted.
* Improves the performance in calculating the ‘estimated time remaining’ when copying/moving large files.
* Improves performance in bringing up Login Screen after resuming from Hibernate.
* Resolves an issue where synchronization of offline files to a server can get corrupted.
* Resolves a compatibility issue with RAW images created by Canon EOS 1D/1DS Digital SLR Camera which can lead to data loss. This only affects RAW images created by these two specific camera models.
* Resolves an issue where a computer can lose its default Gateway address when resuming from sleep mode.
* Improves the performance when copying or moving entire directories containing large amounts of data or files.
* Improves the performance of Vista’s Memory Manager in specific customer scenarios and prevents some issues which may lead to memory corruption.

938194 Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack
This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the reliability and hardware compatibility of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are:

* Improved reliability and compatibility of Vista when used with newer graphics cards in several specific scenarios and configurations.
* Improved reliability when working with external displays on a laptop.
* Increased compatibility with many video drivers.
* Improved visual appearance of games with high intensity graphics.
* Improved quality of playback for HD-DVD and Blue-Ray disks on large monitors.
* Improved reliability for Internet Explorer when some third party toolbars are installed on Vista.
* Improved Vista reliability in networking configuration scenarios.
* Improved the reliability of Windows Calendar in Vista.
* Improved reliability of systems that were upgraded from XP to Vista.
* Increased compatibility with many printer drivers.
* Increased reliability and performance of Vista when entering sleep and resuming from sleep.

Some minor annoyances that I had (such as the no sound when going into hibernation while something is making a noise) aren’t in that list, but still, this is very promising from Microsoft. See the link for the downloads.

Will it send me back to Vista? No, not yet. I’ll wait until SP1 thankyouverymuch. I’ve had my pre-SP1 fun - that’s for sure.

Speaking of computers, it seems mine is playing up tonight, but I think it has something to do with the powerboard I’m using, or even the power supply (need to get that replaced soon anyhow). I dunno though, there were times when not even the graphics card BIOS would start…