Allen:
You were disbelieving when I told you that my laptop sometimes takes 5 minutes, up to half an hour, to come out of standby and get to the point where I can do useful work.
Here is an example:
Today I sat at my desk at 8:33, and brought my laptop out of standby.
This is my first email. I started writing it at 8:47.
i.e. 14 minutes to come out of standby, and get to the point where I can do useful work, like sending email.
(I often see much worse.)
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Most of the people involved in "speeding up standby" measure time, e.g., from hitting the "Come Out of Standby" button, to displaying your desktop. As a result, people have optimized that "first response", doing things like displaying a stale and out-of-date bitmap of your desktop, because seeing something is better than seeing nothing. Unfortunately, many such optimizations actually end up delaying time to actually being able to get work done.
Many of the problems that need to be overcome relate not so much to actually coming outr of standby, as to processing time-based work that has been queued up while in standby.
But, to a user, it doesn't matter.
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I now actively try to avoid using my laptop at home. It so often takes so long to come out of standby or hibernate, and get useful work done, that I can no longer use my work provided laptop PC to "squeeze work in" - e.g. I can't check my email in the 15 minutes before supper, if it takes 15 minutes to go from standby to being able to read my email. I'm not going to bother even if on average it only takes 5 minutes to start up, if it frequently takes 15 minutes or more.
I would lock my laptop and leave it on my desk at work, except that my employer provides no other way that I can work at home. I can't connect to work from my home PC, IT does not allow it. So, I lug my laptop around, but do not even try to use it unless I have a 2 to 3 hour timeslot available at home, in the morning, in the evening, or on weekends.
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4 comments:
Completely sad. We use Macs now and they are pretty fast to wake up.
At Intel, I ran Linux on my laptop and bypassed corp. security when doing remote access. ;-)
I just googled some of the same problems and found your blog. The recovery time from standby was driving me crazy. Are you using Vista on a thinkpad (T60p) with dual screens and ATI video driver? Just curious. Disabling SuperFetch has helped quite a bit. I think SuperFetch is a good idea but I think we are in a corner case where it is massively screwed up and is doing more harm than good. There are are few other well-intentioned features which are conspiring to suck all of the productivity away, and I am interested in trying to figure those out.
No, I am using XP on an IBM T43P - the machine that Intel gives me to work on.
(You can tell how little Intel values my productivity by how lousy a machine they give me.)
By the way, Wayne, the road to Apple slowing down is now apparent:
Apple now recommends virus scanners on Macs.
I preduct Apple will have similar slowness within 5 years.
Particularly if a corporate IT department software install is used.
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