Announcing a new operating system as the "Best choice for laptops" is a pretty confident step given the last years of laptop history. I have seen few combinations of laptops and operating systems that worked properly in all situations, but I have seen many cases where mobility was greatly reduced due to bugs in the power management implementation. Especially with new systems the situation is usually a lot less stable than with older operating systems. Did Microsoft manage a surprising turnaround?

I tested Vista's power management thoroughly on my laptop and ran a quick test on my desktop machine. Here is my experience report.

Lenovo ThinkPad T60

Exactly because power management is such a difficult and hardware dependent topic let me state for the record that I'm using an up-to-date Lenovo ThinkPad T60. Some of the described issues may be and probably are at least partly due to Lenovo bugs. Nevertheless it will be interesting to see all the regressions since XP, which ran, slept, and resumed quite well on my machine.

Stand-by: One of the first things I noticed after installing Vista was the extended stand-by mode. No, I'm not talking about the new hybrid sleep mode, but about something that I call coma sleeping mode: hit the stand-by button and your computer sleeps--with a 1:4 chance for good. In some cases the only chance of getting it back to life is pressing the power button for a few seconds or removing the battery pack.

Another feature that I've come to like is the so-called backpack heater mode. It works like this: You're at the office, it's 7pm. You decide to go home and grab some dinner on the way, so you put your computer to sleep. You stuff it in your backpack and get going. Later that night (usually when you get home), you start unpacking your backpack and discover that it's quite warm. What happened? After a certain (random?) amount of time, Windows decided to wake up and hung during the attempt. Not only is this sudden wakeup a great idea when you're biking home and your laptop gets shaken around, it's also nice to discover that your battery is suddenly empty.

No updating of BIOS and drivers or changing of settings seemed to help make suspend mode anything close to usable. Don't get me wrong, though. Some things work, just not stand-by.

Hibernate: Hibernate is very reliable on my machine. It takes ages (maybe one minute) to actually write the entire state to the hard disk, but at least I lose no data. And the first phase of the wake-up, i.e. reading back the state from the disk, is quite fast. The second phase of the wake-up is not as convincing, though. It easily takes another 30 seconds to unlock the screen and often the fingerprint reader doesn't react at the first time.

Ironically, hibernate has become a little faster when I upgraded my RAM from 1 GB to 2 GB--a highly necessary step. There's more to write to the hard drive but the unlocking seems to go a little faster.

Unlock: Not strictly part of power management, it is still closely related because the computer is locked after resume from stand-by or hibernate. For example when you go on your lunch break, do you suspend your computer or do you just lock the screen? Hibernate is pretty much out of question and with a broken stand-by mode there's not much choice left. So you hit Win+L and leave your desk. So far so good.

The annoyance starts when you get back from your break. On Windows XP it was easy: Enter the password and start working. Occasionally, there were a few seconds delay caused by hard disk activity, but in general it was fine. Windows Vista doesn't just lock the screen; it suspends the current user session and displays the "Switch user" screen. With my initial 1 GB of RAM Vista would take up to a minute (!) to recover from a locked screen. The hard disk was going crazy and even the mouse wouldn't respond. Got back from your break? Go take another one.

Who's to blame for this? A new technology called SuperFetch. (You can read some interesting things about SuperFetch in an article called Why Does Vista Use All My Memory?.) I find the following excerpt from a Microsoft feature highlight very ironic:

"In previous versions of Windows, system responsiveness could be uneven. You may have experienced sluggish behaviour after booting your machine, after performing a fast user switch, or even after lunch."

If anything, SuperFetch made this effect worse on Vista! If you have 2 GB of RAM it's a little less severe but I'd take the old XP behavior back any day. This incredible delay is also great for security. I routinely used to lock my computer when I would go away from my desk, just because it's good practice. Since I installed Vista I simply stopped doing that, I just don't want to wait that long when I get back. The "Most secure Windows ever"? You be the judge.

USB and stand-by: When I was still trying to get the stand-by mode running I noticed some interesting behavior with USB devices. Unplugging the mouse after suspending the laptop just woke up the system again. And at least once my mouse didn't work anymore after the system resumed from stand-by. I had to unplug it and plug it again.

Screen blanking: Vista blacks out the screen after the computer has been idly running on battery for a while. Previous versions used to do that too, so nothing special about this. What's really annoying about it on my computer is that every time I touch a key and the screen comes back, the screen brightness drops to some medium default level and I have to turn up the brightness again to see something.

Desktop machine

The other day I installed Vista on a desktop PC that is maybe two years old, just to see how Vista performs on a desktop. So far it looks quite okay, but power management looks similarly broken.

When I send the computer into stand-by or hibernate mode, it seems to work, but as soon as the suspending process is complete, the system wakes up again, without any keyboard or mouse interaction at all.

A little bit of searching the web turned up a lot of other people who have similar problems and one resolution that seems to help for some of them: Uncheck the "Allow this device to wake the computer" box for certain devices (network adapter, keyboard, mouse) in the device manager.

In my case I needed to uncheck the function for both the HID Keyboard Device (a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000) and the HID-compliant mouse (a Logitech MX900 Bluetooth mouse).

Of course, this "fix" effectively ruins the comfort of being able to wake your computer without reaching the power switch under the table. Even installing the latest drivers from Microsoft and Logitech didn't help.

Bottom line

The rule that the latest operating system is the worst in terms of power management stands strong. While Microsoft had some innovative ideas (i.e. the hybrid sleep mode), the current state of power management in Vista is worse than XP in every respect.

I sincerely hope that the first service pack will take care of this, and that hardware manufacturers keep fixing the bugs on their side. It would be a shame if laptop users would have to wait for a second service pack to make the most basic and most required power management features usable.

Until then it's hibernating, waiting, and the occasional cursing at a computer that refuses to wake up from its nap.

For reference, here's a list of links to the other parts of my Vista review:

• Windows Vista: User interface (Part 1: The Good)
• Windows Vista: User interface (Part 2: The Bad)
• Windows Vista: User interface (Part 3: The So-so)
• Windows Vista (Part 4: Explorer)