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Go the @#$%* to sleep.
Feb. 1st, 2013 08:38 pmThe latest misadventures of this cranky old (as in just over 4+ years old) laptop involve trying to get it to STFU.
Until recently, I just shut the lid before leaving the desk, whether for a brief outing or a night of sleep. Doing so put it into sleep mode, and it snapped back to life as soon as I popped it open and hit any key (I know, "which one's the 'any' key?"). But since it's come unhinged, more or less, that solution resulted in many times where it didn't shut off at all (clearly not good for the drive and board), and others where it did shut off but the screen resolution got gorked and I'd awaken it to a cascade of strangely sized program windows and, usually, a "this is not the optimum resolution" message in the traybar. These didn't seem good for the puter's longterm health, either, so I've been doing the Official Windows Thing- under which, of course, you turn your computer into various stages of "off" by pressing the "start" button.
Unfortunately, Vista abhors sleep much like nature does vacuums. To accomplish that simplest of shutdowns, you need to do a dance of keyboard and mouse strokes that's far more complex than the WINKEY-U-S hot switch from back in XP days. So I checked: is there a built in, or at least a programmable, hotkey combination to make it a quick and easy nitey-nite?
Supposedly there is. You create a shortcut and fill it with what we used to call a DOS command:
C:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe Powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState Sleep
Sounds sensible, right? Except it doesn't work. Instead, it hibernates the computer- which takes longer to restore, and probably wears and tears the drive more than the sleepy alternative does. So I'm flummoxed on how to save my baybee from the Dingo that is Vista.
Yes, I know how to buy a Mac, and how to turn this into a Linux box. My next out-of-the-box machine likely will be one of those, but for now I'm just looking for cheap and easy. Probably should just turn my Skype camera on, huh.
----
Long day today, spent mostly waiting for appointments that were delayed, useless, but hopefully not both. In between, I devoured Rochester's alt-weekly, which told me, among other things, that (a) one of the longest-running steakhouses in the region, the Scotch and Sirloin, closed there after a 40 year run (an unrelated one here remains open, as does their original Syracuse location), (b) there's a new bakeryish place in town with the clever name of Bake It or Cleave It, and, best of all, (c) there's a new movie out called Parker, based on a Donald E. Westlake novel!
Okay, it's not new (it's based on Flashfire, which he wrote in 2000) nor is it, strictly, Westlakey (he used the pseudonym Richard Stark for this series of stories)- and both Lee Marvin and Mel Gibson have played Parker in adaptations of other Westlake material. But still. I loved his work before I knew it was his work (Redford's The Hot Rock from 1971, filmed largely in my old home town, was adapted from a Westlake story that was originally penned with Parker in mind). I think I need to see this- it sounds like marvelous capery fun:)
So instead of Windows Help, I'm expecting somebody paralleling Kelp.
Until recently, I just shut the lid before leaving the desk, whether for a brief outing or a night of sleep. Doing so put it into sleep mode, and it snapped back to life as soon as I popped it open and hit any key (I know, "which one's the 'any' key?"). But since it's come unhinged, more or less, that solution resulted in many times where it didn't shut off at all (clearly not good for the drive and board), and others where it did shut off but the screen resolution got gorked and I'd awaken it to a cascade of strangely sized program windows and, usually, a "this is not the optimum resolution" message in the traybar. These didn't seem good for the puter's longterm health, either, so I've been doing the Official Windows Thing- under which, of course, you turn your computer into various stages of "off" by pressing the "start" button.
Unfortunately, Vista abhors sleep much like nature does vacuums. To accomplish that simplest of shutdowns, you need to do a dance of keyboard and mouse strokes that's far more complex than the WINKEY-U-S hot switch from back in XP days. So I checked: is there a built in, or at least a programmable, hotkey combination to make it a quick and easy nitey-nite?
Supposedly there is. You create a shortcut and fill it with what we used to call a DOS command:
C:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe Powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState Sleep
Sounds sensible, right? Except it doesn't work. Instead, it hibernates the computer- which takes longer to restore, and probably wears and tears the drive more than the sleepy alternative does. So I'm flummoxed on how to save my baybee from the Dingo that is Vista.
Yes, I know how to buy a Mac, and how to turn this into a Linux box. My next out-of-the-box machine likely will be one of those, but for now I'm just looking for cheap and easy. Probably should just turn my Skype camera on, huh.
----
Long day today, spent mostly waiting for appointments that were delayed, useless, but hopefully not both. In between, I devoured Rochester's alt-weekly, which told me, among other things, that (a) one of the longest-running steakhouses in the region, the Scotch and Sirloin, closed there after a 40 year run (an unrelated one here remains open, as does their original Syracuse location), (b) there's a new bakeryish place in town with the clever name of Bake It or Cleave It, and, best of all, (c) there's a new movie out called Parker, based on a Donald E. Westlake novel!
Okay, it's not new (it's based on Flashfire, which he wrote in 2000) nor is it, strictly, Westlakey (he used the pseudonym Richard Stark for this series of stories)- and both Lee Marvin and Mel Gibson have played Parker in adaptations of other Westlake material. But still. I loved his work before I knew it was his work (Redford's The Hot Rock from 1971, filmed largely in my old home town, was adapted from a Westlake story that was originally penned with Parker in mind). I think I need to see this- it sounds like marvelous capery fun:)
So instead of Windows Help, I'm expecting somebody paralleling Kelp.