Sleep/Standby Times Not Very Good
One thing I loved about my old PowerBook (and any Mac laptop in general) was that the sleep times were very long. For some reason, the OS or the architecture of Apple notebooks was so power-efficient that you can actually leave it on standby mode (called sleep by Mac users) for days, but the drain would be very minimal (about 2 % per day or so).
One of my other laptops, a Compaq V2000, wasn’t so great with standby times. It would eat about 5% per hour. So leaving the laptop sleeping in my bag all day would cause it to drain 1/3 of its battery juice. I’m not so sure if it’s because of the operating system, or simply because of the architecture. I noticed that having the laptop sleep under Windows XP ate a little less power than when it was sleeping under Linux (Ubuntu Feisty Fawn).
Same with the Asus Eee. I’m running the default Xandros OS, and whenever I put the Eee to sleep, it would eat up about 10% of the battery’s remaining capacity every two hours.
Frankly, that sucks. For me, one purpose of having a long sleep mode battery life is so I could just close the lid, stick the laptop in my bag, and go my way. Sleep and recovery times are usually very quick–just under 5 seconds on the Eee. Two seconds to sleep, and about 5 seconds to wake up.
However, do consider that booting up the Eee from a powered-off state only takes about 30 seconds. So there’s no question that booting up is almost as quick as waking up on some other laptops (usually those that run Windows). Still, the point behind sleeping instead of shutting down a laptop is that all your applications and documents are still in the state you left them.
Well, one solution could be auto-startup of your favorite apps. But that’s for another post.
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Part of this may be architecture-related. There are different so-called “soft power” standards (power controlled by software, selectively-powered devices, etc).
Older Macs used a kind of memory based on physical switches, not electrical gates. It’s called SRAM, and used mostly in processors now. Macs could snooze with only their “wake” circuit active.
A PC computer has two suspend states. In one, the RAM stays charged, as well as the wake circuit, and any device that wasn’t told to reduce consumption (linux still has a little way to go on laptop-friendly drivers).
Hibernate in Windows copies the full contents of memory to disk and shuts everything down. A special key tells the OS to take a shortcut the next time it turns on, and voila! you get your programs back. Only, sometimes a device has trouble with resuming its hibernated state, or there is a lack of “resources”, or God hates you or something, and then hibernate only makes life worse.
The best practice is to always save and quit, and you can always make certain things come up every time it turns on. This is better for reliability, and more programs are behaving like Opera (and development software of various brands): You can resume sessions, bring up everything you had open when the program closed, etc.
The time factor is miniscule at best: A person can safely tuck the Eee into its case or their own pocket while it’s shutting down, then turn it on while heading for a place to sit. No HDD to bump, remember?
This is why I choose to turn off my eeepc when ever it is on standby. Battery charge is essential when you are mobile and boot time is considerably quick with xandros so turning off is almost just as quick as waking up from standby.
ummm just turn off your eee pc xandros takes 25 secs to boot up…
i know your time is precious but 25 secs just wait till it turns on.
I want the ASUS Eee to stay on and connected to the web when I close the lid. Does Xandros have a ‘do nothing” power setting like Windows? Or is there anothre way?
how good is standby on eee 900?
Great post. I’ve seen similar performance from the EEE - and I have Macbook experience too. I think I’m going to miss the sleep/wakeup performance of the Macbook most of all.
Im totally in the same boat, I was just thinking as I turned my Eee on because it died over night from being on stand by.
I come from the macw world too. I’ve had old powerbooks, ibooks, g4 and g4 ibooks and powerbooks, and a macbook. I have never had a problem with sleeping on them, I could always go for a week or more on standby and the battery would still have life on it.
I have had various thinkpads and other PC based laptops as well, and the performance was mediocre. I am starting to miss my macbook. I bought the Eee about two weeks ago because I sold my MacBook. The Macbook was having problems with the inverter, I didn’t really want to replace it. So I decided to get an E.
I like the Eee, but the battery / standby is just horrible for me. I’m so used to leaving my computer in sleep mode and waking it up from sleep and it still has battery left to do lot’s of work on. With the Eeepc, I keep finding it dead after only one night or so. It barely makes it 24 - 28 hours in sleep mode, it’s crazy.