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Jan
30

Vista Laptops Won’t Melt in Your Bag Anymore

Series - Vista Kernel

  1. Vista Laptops Won't Melt in Your Bag Anymore
  2. Vista Kernel Improvements

Remember the days when you closed the lid of your laptop expecting it to go to sleep (or maybe you manually told it to sleep), shoved it in your bag, then arrived at your destination only to find the laptop hadn’t shut down, a melted candy bar, and no battery power left to finish the document due that evening! I do too. It wasn’t that long ago we were all using Windows XP. See, it turns out that the XP kernel trusted drivers far too much when it came to sleep modes. If a buggy driver didn’t handle the power event properly, the kernel would just block forever and happily drain your battery (while melting your candy). Some changes in the Vista kernel remedy this situation. If a driver doesn’t behave in defined amount of time, the kernel will skip it and eventually tuck your laptop into bed with plenty of power to spare. Sometimes the little things make a huge difference! 

Posted in windows vista |

2 Responses

  1. Mark Muehlbauer Says:

    I had a much better solution implemented. I bought a warm lunch that wanted to stay hot and made sure my power adapter was always plugged in before my portable desktop, I mean, notebook PC was plugged back in. As a professional consultant I found this to be a far superior and a much more efficient use of energy making this problem work for me rather than against me. Consequently, you are now asking that all my lunches now go cold? How dare you!

  2. gabe frost . looking forward » Blog Archive » Vista Kernel Improvements Says:

    […] There have been numerous improvements to the Vista kernel which greatly improve user experiences and deterministic application behavior. I’ve mentioned one such improvement earlier in my post about Vista not melting laptops (a form of I/O cancellation I talk about below), and will mention a few others here. I learned about these improvements by attending a lecture from Mark Russinovich from SysInternals fame a few months back. […]

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