Hibernation Hotfix for Windows XP and Vista and Insomnia Madness

Posted on April 8th, 2008 by Anthony Clendenen.
Categories: 1E, ConfigMgr, Energy, Green, KB Articles, NightWatchman, Power Management, Shopping.

I have read of reports where systems will not resume from hibernation but have not seen it replicated myself. Well if you have seen this problem in your environment this patch, released on April 7th by Microsoft (KB 951126), may be just what the doctor ordered.

Insomnia? Ambien…

I have also heard reports of a software vendor that claims to have a patch for a situation they refer to as insomnia. They claim that a bug in the Windows operating system will actually prevent the system from going into hibernate and have a patch to fix it.

In reality there is no bug and here is what happens. In the power scheme settings there is a specified time for the system to go into a low power state after n minutes of idle time. Idle time is when there are no keyboard inputs, mouse movements or changes in window focus, all actions typically performed by the user. Once the computers idle timer expires the OS will go into a low power state but before that it will query running applications to see if they are busy doing anything and if any of them respond with a "Yes, I am still working!" the idle timer gets reset and the system stays in its current power state. The idle timer will reset to n minutes and when it expires it will check again.

This process is actually handled by SetThreadExecutionState function, which allows application to respond to this request with various values to be able to complete their tasks. So not only is this not a bug in the OS, if there is a bug it lies in the application that is incorrectly responding and keeping the OS from going into a low power state or it truly is working and needs the computer to stay up. The whole idea is to keep applications from crashing, causing a BSOD or worse a RSOD and corrupting files. And personally, the only patch I am going to install for my operating system is going to have to come from Microsoft, I will apply patches from vendors for their own software but if they issue a patch to fix another vendors software I would be a bit concerned to say the least.

More technical details of the function can be found here on msdn.

If you are coming to MMS see you in just a couple weeks! You can find me hanging out at the booth or in sessions. I will actually be putting on a couple demos during the week at our booth as well.

Regards,
Anthony

Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E