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Wake up JEFF
Computers can be configured to ‘wake-up’ to certain peripheral device activities, something (as I recall) pioneered in the PC Space by Apple’s Nubus back in the ‘dark ages?’ The idea is that we can conserve electricity by putting our computers to ‘sleep’ and have some event (such as someone wanting to talk with the computer) wake up the computer.
Today, ‘wake-up’ is a common feature offered on computers.
Apart from the security implications of a computer activating (or being owned) when you plug in a Firewire / IEE1394 device (such as some external drives and Digitial Video Cameras) there’s a nice feature in Windows Vista that would ‘wake-up’ my laptop when I move my external/usb mouse.
Wake-up on USB is a nice feature, that you love half the time, and hate the other half.
Put the laptop into sleep, or just let the screen saver do it and go away from your desk for a cup of coffee or something. It is seriously convenient to just get to back, bump the mouse and be back online browsing the web (oops, working!!!.)
On the other hand, it is hugely inconvenient to put the laptop to sleep, shutdown the screen and then have someone else bump the mouse for the laptop to be active while the screen is down (i.e. no clear indicator for me that my battery is draining away.) It doesn’t help that it seems that since I have my laptop authenticate after waking up, it doesn’t go back to sleep so my battery can be totally drained with the lid down.
Don’t even go into the problem that many people have, where something wakes Windows/Laptop up while it’s in your bag giving the laptop a good chance to drain the battery and heat it self up silly.
As a given, if you put your Windows box into sleep mode, and you don’t want it to wake-up because you’re putting the laptop into your bag, pull all the USB devices out before Windows gets into ‘sleep’ nirvana.
The lessons.
Decide on the level of inconvenience your prefer. Until Windows is intelligent enough to figure out that Monday ~ Friday between 5:00 and 6:00pm when I put the thing to sleep, I don’t want it to wake up until I open the lid, live with it. Actually, if Windows and this laptop can just figure out I don’t ever want the laptop to wake-up while the lid is down, that would be a huge success.
Like, how often do you hear of people on battery power turning on their laptops while the screen is shut. they must be in a different world over at Redmond?
For battery life, get another power-brick for your laptop (unfortunately I’m over-geeked and carry two laptops with one power-brick between them.) Come to me sayeth Windows, for I will make your yoke heavy.
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