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Sleep and Shut Down Issues Continue With Vista

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MeYesterday was a hectic rehearsal day, as was this entire week, save for a brief respite on Thanksgiving Day. We had two run thrus of It’s A Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play. It is is a short play (about 90 minutes long without intermission,) which allows for the double attempt at the show in one rehearsal. As usual I’m taking notes in rehearsal, this time just using the Lenovo ThinkPad X61 Tablet PC.

I’m still frustrated with Vista on one front here and that is putting the Tablet PC to sleep. 3 times out of 4 everything will work as advertised. Close the lid, unit goes to sleep, open the lid, unit returns. But occasionally the OS just goes off into its own world without sleeping, or after a successful sleep, not returning. Occasionally it will return from sleep but the screen will stay dark.

I’m beginning to think (this seems to be somewhat reproducible here) that these issues have something to do with being connected or disconnected to our WiFi network. Here’s what I’m experiencing and maybe someone smarter than me can help out here with some thoughts.

Normally I turn off WiFi when taking notes to save on battery life. I haven’t had to do this on this short show, or since the latest round of Windows updates as I’m getting just under 6 hours of battery life pretty consistently, even with WiFi on, which is more than enough. After an act is over, I’ll close the lid and put the unit to sleep, to wake it up when the next act begins.

Yesterday, I was trying to catch up on some other work before rehearsal began and realized that I had used quite a bit of juice in doing so. After the first act I did the routine as described above and all worked well. After the 2nd act of the first dress rehearsal began, I decided to turn off the WiFi. I did so, and then put the Tablet PC to sleep. It hung and required a reboot.

So, during the next run, I experimented with this. What I discovered was this: when WiFi was on, all would work well, but turning off WiFi created would require a reboot to get things going again. If the device was cold booted with WiFi off, I would have no issues sleeping and waking up.

Again, this is somewhat anecdotal, and not quite scientific, but if anyone can shed any light on this, I’d love to hear it. Very frustrating.

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