Vista RTM goes into sleep state

I HAVE to admit that I really like Vista RTM, at least I do at press time.

My games work on it and all the usual suspects work as well. The only thing that is currently missing are the motherboard tools. We have to ask Abit, Asus, Epox and the like when can we expect the Vista version of these tools. Until then we won't be able to update or tweak the BIOS from Vista, at least not for the time being. We are asking around to see when these should debut.

We like the new Vista Sleep mode. Windows 2000 introduced hibernate, a very cool mode to save your work and shut the machine down.

And many readers have written to tell us XP has always had this with its S3 feature, provided you had S3 supported on your mobo.

Anyhow, on Vista, when you press it, it will give your machine a break. But the main difference is that it will completely shut your machine down and will turn off the PSU and the CPU/Chipset coolers and the hard drive. The machine will act like it is completely turned off.

Hibernate takes time to save the memory state on the drive. And when you have 2GB+ it takes some time before it finishes up. It also takes time to load the hard drive hibernated state into system memory. You have to load 2GB+ from the hard drive to memory and that is slow, at some 30 MB/Sec+, if you're lucky.

All this goes to sleep, and wakes up later

Unlike that, the sleep function wakes up the computer in the matter of seconds. It takes five to seven seconds to have your machine back on the feet. You can revoke a bunch of programs. It takes twenty-five seconds to put the programs to sleep and some seven to wake them up again.

You can put the machine to sleep and wander off to enjoy the silence of your home until you need it again. It won't take more then seven seconds to get it back on its feet and start working, as if it was turned on all the time. It beats hibernate and beats the booting the machine and works great if not perfectly.

My network continues to sleep

Unfortunately my 1 Gb integrated network card doesn't wake up properly. You need to reset the adapter and it works after that, but that will take a few seconds of your time. It still beats hibernate or booting up but my problem could be the network card or driver specific. I am using Nvidia network adaptor, the integrated one and part of the Abit Nforce 4 SLI 32X chipset and there is still no any fix around this. Maybe Nvidia will wake up and fix it soon, at least I hope.

Anyhow, this is the way the improved standby feature is presented by Vista. I still don't know how exactly does it works but I suspect that it can power the memory modules with some minimal power and keep the information's on your RAM. We will investigate further. ?