I just ran the Disk Cleanup utility and discovered this little gem: 3.13GB worth of disk space worth of Vista error reports. Why would it be allowed to grow this large? Seriously, what’s the point. Anyway, if you’re looking for some extra disk space you might just recapture some of it here like I just did. If only my fondness for Vista grew as fast as it’s waste of my disk space (have you checked the size of your winsxs directory lately?)
_5218fbfab5864e1da0d58078f21ade1e.jpg "Windows Disk Cleanup Utlity")
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Tags: Vista
I’m running Vista on a MacBook Pro using bootcamp and over the past 7 days Vista’s Sleep functionality has completely failed which isn’t necessarily a new problem. Now, the vast majority of times when the machine enters Sleep mode it eventually results in a system failure and reboot and roughly 30% of the time lost data of one kind or another leaving this message in the Event Viewer:
The previous system shutdown at 11:07:50 PM on 1/26/2009 was unexpected.
I’m open to suggestions as to how to fix this problem. On Jan 9th 2009, I installed AVG Free (which I’ve now uninstalled) but that’s it, no other software has been installed/removed.
Any ideas?
[Update: Feb 5, 2009] Knock on wood but after uninstalling FreeAVG I seem to be in a fairly stable state again WRT Sleep, meaning my machine actually wakes properly at this point. Go figure.
Given this issue is
biting me, from
/. I found this
this link to a PDF from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer containing pages of internal Microsoft emails relating to Vista compatibility issues. Makes for interesting reading. There are plenty of damning quotes so you can pretty much take your pick. I wonder if that’s related to
this news regarding price cuts.
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Tags: Vista
It appears the
problem with my display not restarting after resuming from a sleep or hibernate state has resurfaced. I
thought a
reinstall of SP1 had done the "trick" though now that appears not to be the case. Over the weekend the machine had rebooted while unattended which
in my case means the desktop was sitting in OSX. I restarted the machine, this time selecting the Vista partition, which presented me the standard boot menu saying the previous shutdown had failed so I selected "Start Windows normally". At that point, the machine hung on the progress meter on the Vista boot screen and I had to hard reset and reboot again which, with fingers crossed, worked.
I’ve been trying to think what might have sparked all this and all I can come up with is the fact that I switched momentarily into the Aero UI from the Windows Vista Basic color scheme to get a screenshot. I’m now likely to uninstall SP1 for a final time as this close-the-lid-and-pray just doesn’t cut it for me.
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Tags: Vista
After reading this comment from Enrico Giordani (Ciao!), whom I worked with back in 1999 while working for Microsoft in Redmond, I decided to try Vista SP1 again though this time with my USB key in my pocket. Guess what? I no longer have the display problem as described in the SP1 readme. I’m at a loss to explain why my machine is now working but I’ll take it! I reconfigured my video card, tried different resolutions, unconnected my external monitor and rebooted at least a dozen times trying to work around the issue but alas nothing worked although all the while my USB key was in its slot with ReadyBoost enabled. I removed the USB key and reinstalled SP1 from scratch and Sleep is now working as it had with the RTM. I’ve also reconnected my USB key with ReadyBoost enabled as well as with my external monitor attached and all is working just fine.
Go figure!
Anyway, Enrico, thanks for the comment you salvaged SP1 for me! Grazie!
[Update: March 29] Update the link to the release notes since the previous MS link broke.
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Tags: Vista
I wrestled with Vista SP1 for the better part of Friday night and early Saturday morning and after roughly a dozen or more restarts I’ve uninstalled. I rely on my machine to restore from hibernate and sleep daily and SP1
admittedly broke that functionality. I had higher hopes. This was the shortest amount of time any Windows SP has lasted for me before hitting a problem that was worse than the original, about 15 hours. I tried numerous changes to my video settings to no avail and I don’t have time to mess around with a laptop that can’t "recover" from sleep. In a comment to
this post Bill Meyer clued me in to the fact that this isn’t a new problem for Vista which doesn’t bode well when it comes to hoping for a fix. On a positive note, the uninstalled worked as advertised and I haven't (yet) noticed any additional problems and sleep now works as it did before.
Any other MacBook Pro/Vista users experiencing this issue?
[Update: March 29, 2008] Update the link to the release notes since the original link to Microsoft's website no longer works.
I just installed Vista SP1 on my MacBook Pro without any problems. (knock, knock)
So far I haven’t noticed any difference though I’ll be interested to exercise the file copy improvements.
[UPDATE: Feb 15, 2008] I've been bitten by the "
Display" problem as outlined in the
Vista SP1 release notes which states (emphasis mine):
In some cases,
computers that use multiple monitors may display black screens when the
display mode is changed after resuming from sleep. This issue can also
affect laptop computers connected to an external monitor. Display mode
changes may occur in any of the following circumstances:
-
Attaching or detaching a monitor.
-
Accessing the computer remotely.
-
Changing the screen resolution or color depth using the Display Properties dialog box (which you can access in Control Panel) or an application.
-
Logging users on or off.
-
Rotating the display on a tablet computer.
To avoid this, do not use multiple monitors, or do not allow the computer to sleep or change the display mode.
If this has already occurred, restart the computer.
It actually offers these things as ways "to avoid this"! Something is seriously wrong in Redmond when this sort of problem and this list of workarounds is the first item in the relnotes. I've been running Windows Vista Ultimate since the day I got this machine and have been impressed that Sleep and Hibernate have worked pretty much flawlessly and had come to rely on it. In my mind, the people who put this item in the relnotes had to be thinking, this is so (pardon me) !#%*ing bad,
it's got to be listed as the first problem item. Definitely not a happy camper at this point.
I now need to try and find out if Boot Camp v2.0 included with Leopard has this problem.
[UPDATE #2: Feb 15, 2008] The problem of the display not resuming occurs regardless of whether or not a secondary display is connected.
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Tags: Vista