When Windows 7 upgrades won’t hibernate (the solution)
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, support, Windows 7, Power, Beta, Windows, Laptop, Microsoft on
The only time I don’t want to hibernate my PC is if I’m walking from one meeting to another that’s two minutes away - like a conference where I use the ten minutes between sessions to catch up on my email before rushing off at the last minute to the next presentation. And with the much faster resume time on Windows 7 (15 to 30 seconds) I might remove my complicated hybrid sleep timer (3 minutes into sleep then 7 minutes into hibernate, in case I find a fascinating conversation and linger in the hall) and just hibernate all the time.
So many updates slipstream without forcing a reboot now that I can just keep going until I choose to restart (assuming Office 2010 sorts out its issues with making Word documents left open from the server during hibernation read only, which I’m working around by using Offline Files - although that has its own issue where the files can’t be saved when I’m actually offline; there’s always something with pre-release software).
But when we first put the RTM code for Windows 7 on it, Simon’s HP EliteBook 2710p kept waking up like a child asking for a glass of water. If you upgrade a machine from Vista to 7 and you find it won’t stay in hibernation, check the BIOS. Do you have Wake On LAN turned on? If not, check the disk partitions.
Like many OEMs, HP ships the 2710p with a recovery partition; it has a utility for fast booting and looking at email and contacts in a pre-boot environment and it has what you need to get the original version of Windows restored if you ever need it. That means it’s a system partition that the BIOS needs to know about and that means it ought to be marked as active, but then you wouldn’t be able to boot from the Windows 7 system partition. Sometimes that’s not a problem - but sometimes it means that when you try to hibernate, when the system hits a sufficiently deep ACPI power-off level, it all wakes up again because of the recovery partition - which puts you straight back into Windows. If you do an upgrade install to preserve your installed applications, that leaves the original - and now useless - recovery partition in place. You can remove that and add the disk space to the main partition; we’ve seen that fix some hibernation issues, and on a two-year-old notebook the 8-10GB disk space you get back is well worth it.
However, it didn’t fix the hibernation problem on the EliteBook. We had the same problem with our elderly Elonex media center, which has a new lease of life with Windows 7; with the Release Candidate it was so sprightly that about a minute after we hibernated the machine it would just start back up again, and that didn’t have a recovery partition. The EliteBook didn’t have the hibernation issue with RC, so it’s not a bug. In both cases, a clean install of the RTM code fixed the problem instantly - our suspicion is that it’s an interaction between a driver and an RC to RTM upgrade (which, although, possible, certainly isn’t recommended). In practice, you’re not likely to see this issue on any user machines when you roll out Windows 7, though you might find on your own test system. Bite the bullet and do the clean install; it’s going to give you a more reliable system.
BONUS HELP: if you have a completely different hibernation problem, and you’re looking on the Microsoft knowledge base, you might find a new tool called Fix It. When there’s a registry change that needs making, or some other simple-if-you-know-how fix that you wouldn’t want an end user to mess around in the system trying to implement, many KBs now give you a button to press to make the change for you. No copying keys into your own registry fixomatic scripts, no wondering if the advice site you’re getting a .REG file from is really safe to use. This has been quietly building up since last autumn and you can see all the fixes so far at the Fix It blog or keep them to hand for users with the Fixit sidebar gadget. Invaluable!
-Mary
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AMD to the future
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Power, AMD, virtualisation, Processors, Futures, Enterprise, Hardware on
Last week saw the 6th birthday of AMD’s Opteron CPU, the core of its server product line. We were among a small group of journalists and analysts at AMD’s Sunnyvale campus for the event - which also included the launch of a new generation of silicon, and the unveiling of AMD’s Opteron roadmap for the next few years.
Pointing out that “the server market is very different”, AMD’s Nigel Dessau opened the even with a look at the way the server market has been changing over the last few years - with a move to throughput rather than clock speed with multicore systems, to virtualisation, and to designing for energy efficiency, all with the aim of changing the economics of the data centre. The result has been increaded server density and utilisation - more bang for your buck in less space!
So what happens next? Dessau suggests that “The way you assemble architectures is what makes the difference.” That’s why AMD puts so much into its CPUs, with much of what we’d normally consider to be the supporting chipset - including memory controllers - on the same silicon. It’s not quite a system on a chip, but it’s getting very close these days.
Pat Patla, the GM and VP of AMD’s Server Business Unit unveiled the new hardware. This was the roll out of the Istanbul product range, a six-core processor for existing two, four and eight socket systems with what he said was “30% more performance than the previous generation at the same power”. Istanbul also brings all of AMD’s power management technologies into one place as AMD-P.
Istanbul isn’t the end of the story - the next chapter is already being written in. AMD is already sampling its next generation processor, the 12-core “Magny-Cours”, which despite being a terrible pun, is a rather zippy piece of silicon - we watched a 48 core demo system much its way through several benchmarks. It’s not that far away, either, and should ship in 2010.
Virtualisation is a target market for the next generation of silicon, and it will add support for virtualised I/O. With I/O devices virtualised there’s a lot of scope for new application and new ways of working (as well as a chance to virtualise applications and servers that previously were locked into existing hardware). It’s all part of the Infrastructure 2.0 model, where management tools take advantage of hardware to deliver flexible self-managed virtualised data centres.
The other part of the AMD story is how it’s working on power management, with products available in different thermal bands - including a low power range intended for single and dual socket high density applications, ideal for cloud data centres. There’s a lot to be said for this approach, especially as all the features of the high end, high power CPUs are in the energy efficient versions. Dense deployments need greater efficiencies, as data centre costs are a huge proportion of the costs incurred in running a cloud service. With an average power of 40W, the EE series processors will help keep those cooling and power costs down.
Magny-Cours is only part of the AMD roadmap, and the company’s current architecture is a long term play (which is good for virtualisation, as it will allow asymmetric migrations, letting businesses use older hardware for disaster recovery purposes). The next generation will be 32nm devices in 2011, a 12 to 16 core device codenamed Interlagos and a 6 to 8 core device codenamed Valencia.
–Simon
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Eee PC 1000HE; the netbook with a real battery
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Processors, Power, Hardware, Laptop, Intel, HP on
How do you get a full day’s work out of a netbook? Make it bigger (and turn everything off).
The latest Eee PC, the 1000HE, has a hefty 8700mAh battery but because the Eee is quite chunky itself that doesn’t stick out much at the bottom. If you want a thinner netbook, the HP Mini and Mini-Note models are far slimmer than the Eee (and they weight rather less too, even with HP’s 6-cell extended battery); in fact, the 17″ MacBook Pro is thinner than the Eee 100HE, although the MacBook is obvious far less portable in other ways (I’d have to switch from the natty Cirque du Soleil handbag that my beloved HP EliteBook 2730p tablet fits in perfectly to a messenger bag, albeit a slim one).
But if you can put up with the less than slim casing of the 1000He, you get a very portable machine that you can take more seriously than many netbooks, although there are still compromises. Forget 16GB SSDs; you get 160GB of hard drive, which puts many 12″ notebooks to shame. The keyboard is a significant improvement over most netbooks; with a separate frame to avoid the bouncing and flexing that previous Eees were prone to, it’s more comfortable to type on, and while the keys are small they’re widely spaced apart, as on some Sony VAIOs and MacBooks, so you”re much less likely to hit the wrong key even if your finger is too big to hit just the key you’re aiming at. Even so, the HP Mini-Note keyboard remains the one to beat - the Eee keyboard is good, but not that good.
The trackpad is the ElanTech SmartPad that Dell uses on the Mini 12, which has more multi-touch options than you can shake a fist at; two finger scroll, pinch zoom and rotation, drag and drop that you can’t drop by accident, a double-tap gesture for opening a magnifying glass window, and three-finger swipe (sideways for page up and page down, up and down for launching My Computer and opening Alt-Tab and switching windows by waggling your fingers around on the touchpad). You have to get used to the gestures, but they can speed you up, especially on a small keyboard like this.
Talking of speeding up, the 1.66GHz Atom N280 ought to be faster than the 1.6GHz N270 in most netbooks; frankly we didn’t notice and when a Web site script went beserk and opened over 20 tabs while Word and Windows Media Player were running, things ground to a halt. Once you step down the processor speed to improve the battery life, it doesn’t matter what the top speed is.
No Atom system is going to be a patch on a Centrino 2 and they don’t pretend to be. But then the only way to get a 9 hour battery life on a Centrino 2 machine is to add an extended battery. The Samsung NC10 had the best battery life of last year’s netbooks with a battery that didn’t bulge out of the case and that was up to 7 hours 30 minutes without Wi-Fi and with a dim screen, or 6 hours 30 with Wi-Fi on and the screen comfortably bright. The HP Mini-Note 2140 has an optional 6-cell battery that does stick out (you may find it gives you a better typing angle because it lifts up the keyboard); that manages five hours in heavy use (streaming video and music) and well over seven hours for general use with Wi-Fi and good screen brightness.
The sticker on the Eee actually claims 9.5 hours; that’s if you’re in power-saving mode (and the button for that is now a tiny button above the keyboard, next to options for turning off the screen altogether, switching resolution and - oddly - launching Skype), with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and the Web cam turned off and the screen set to 40% brightness. The screen is noticeably dimmer than other netbooks and notebooks even at full brightness and 40% isn’t particularly comfortable for viewing. Advertising 9.5 hours most users will never see made me expect that the Eee 100HE would leave me disappointed (and hunting for a power socket), but it delivers very respectable battery life in normal use.
Turn on the Wi-Fi and the power icon promises 7 hours 15 minutes; this fluctuates up and down depending on what you’re using the PC for but after 5 hours of downloading software, browsing Web pages, streaming music and editing documents the battery still promised almost two more hours of use and we did indeed get just over 7 hours. You can play over 6 hours of video (which drives the processor and the screen harder than many apps) before the battery runs down.
In the real world, that really is a full working day. Combined with a keyboard normal adults can actually use, this makes the new Eee a significant advance on the recent stream of me-too netbooks and the kind of machine we hoped for when the first Eee came out. It finally gives the Mini-Note 2140 a competitor and because Asus has much better distribution than HP you can expect to find the 1000HE at increasingly low prices.
- Mary
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We have 7,000 servers. No wait, 13,000. What do they all do again?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in virtualisation, Power, Enterprise, Business, Server, Hardware, HP on
Server sprawl. It’s only human nature. I mean, not everything in my freezer is labeled because how could I possibly mistake frozen sliced pineapple for frozen sliced mango or frozen sliced polenta? And it’s obvious that KINGEX is the Exchange server for the Kingston branch and KINGXEX is the Exchange server from the Kings Cross branch and SERVER 111 is either the 111th server we put in or the server we put in on either the eleventh of January or the first of November
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24 hours of battery life; now that
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Power, Laptop, HP, Mobile on
When your battery runs out, your laptop is nothing more than a paperweight. More portable devices like the recent rash of
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