Bad drivers ignore pleas for sleep

Vista’s hybrid sleep mode promises green benefits but is easily disturbed by incompatible drivers

It’s good to see that, after seven years or so, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has finally got round to updating the requirements for its Energy Star logo programme for computers; they arrive just in time to see EPA’s familiar logo disappear without a trace in Windows Vista.

But that’s merely an aside. These days, anything that even suggestively winks at a passing electron is fair game for those trying to purvey magical remedies for all your energy woes. Recently, I received a press release from Microsoft that proclaimed how much more carbon-friendly Vista is compared with XP. Puzzled, I read further, only to find that it concerned an “independent study” that had shown that Vista’s default power management settings (it ships with a sleep timeout of 60 minutes) are better than those of XP. Why such a glaringly obvious fact needs independent proof escapes me.

It may be a laudable improvement, but to promote it as a serious reason to upgrade smacks a little of jumping on a bandwagon. It would be better and cheaper for most companies if they got to grips with the power management capabilities of current systems, decided on a few default settings and applied them via Group Policy or a logon script.

But something Microsoft doesn’t shout about – mainly because it can’t do much about it – is that the best power management capabilities in the world can be ruined by a single shoddy driver or software application.

I’m really impressed by Vista’s new “hybrid sleep” mode (a combination of standby and hibernate modes) because it’s as fast as normal standby but with the safety of data written to disk, as in hibernation mode.

However, I’ve recently been plagued by my PC failing to enter hybrid sleep. I assumed a hardware problem and tried everything from resetting the Bios to unplugging peripherals. It wasn’t until I did the “what exactly was I doing just before this happened” routine that I realised it might be an application. And sure enough, I remembered that a few days previously I had installed a new “Vista Ready” application – Cyberlink DVD Suite 5. Removing this solved the problem – and yes, I have let Cyberlink know about it.

Vista’s power management system has actually been revamped much more deeply than simple changes to default timeouts, but Microsoft has battled in vain over the years to make software developers more “power aware”. So if you’re contemplating starting Vista compatibility tests, don’t forget to include some appropriate tests to make sure your vital applications aren’t power mad.