I’m all for power saving computing. However, it’s a bit of a black art to tell when the computer is truly idle. It appears that Microsoft still has not found the correct incantation or small mammal to sacrifice to get it to work under the default Vista settings.
In the first day it went to sleep while:
- installing Visual Studio: resumed after waking up.
- unarchiving a 1.45Gig file: zip extraction was hung after that; required shooting down explorer and restarting it.
- building a large project in Visual Studio: resumed after waking the computer.
I was tempted to rename it Vista, narcolepsy edition.
I understand that human interaction is one way to measure if a machine is being used but sometimes people walk away from computers when they’re doing really long tasks. If you turn the computer off on these sorts of tasks people will just turn power saving modes off which is a bit self-defeating.
I’d like to see some self tuning in this area. Maybe the default should be to go to sleep like it does. After waking it perhaps Vista could show what processes were active when it went to sleep and give me an option to say which ones should postpone the sleep mode. That way I would not lose a long Visual Studio build that I kicked off before I went to bed.
