racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

When you close your laptop lid, you’d expect your computer to go to sleep, and perhaps after a few minutes of inactivity go to hibernate mode. This is a default with Apple notebooks—the sleep functionality is so efficient that the computer goes into suspended state in a couple of seconds and wakes up as quickly.

I can’t say the same about Windows, though. Sleep takes about 5 to 10 seconds on my machine. Waking up takes about twice as long. And hibernate? Depending on how large your system RAM is and the speed of your hard drive, you could be looking at a 30 second wait for hibernation and a couple of minutes for waking up.

I’ve assigned the power button on my Presario to be the shortcut for hibernate. I rarely shut down since I prefer to have all my work still open when I turn on the computer—opening up everything after a fresh restart seems too tedious. I only shut down completely when I really have to reboot the system (i.e., after installing applications).

But a few days ago, my laptop almost got burned because of crappy hibernation sequences. So as it was approaching noon—the time I’m supposed to pick up my wife and daughter from work and school, respectively—I hit the power button, closed the lid and stuffed the laptop into my backpack, thinking it had already started with the hibernate sequence.

This time, it did not.

It turns out that there was a glitch with the wireless connection and Windows displayed a prompt that the computer could not go into hibernate mode at that time. Stupid as Windows was, the prompt stayed on, and somehow managed to prevent the computer from sleeping or hibernating. By default, the laptop was supposed to sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity and hibernate after 10 more minutes, if on battery mode.

So as we had a quick lunch, the laptop was still running inside the backpack, which I left inside the car. As I was carrying the bag on my back upon arriving home, I kept wondering whether the heat was coming from inside the backpack or just the noontime sun. Boy was I surprised when I opened the bag. I almost panicked because the computer had been so hot I could smell something almost burning inside (the same smell when you’re using soldering lead).

It’s good the laptop survived without problems. I think that incident might have accelerated the laptop’s aging by a few months, though.

And this is one of the reasons I’m not too happy with Windows. If I had brought the PoewrBook, none of this would have happened. Thing is, the work I was currently doing was on the Windows machine, and among the two, it’s the smaller and lighter one, so it’s easier to carry around in quick trips.