More Vista weirdness

Maybe I shouldn't blame Vista for this, maybe it's hardware, but I doubt it.

Two days ago (coincidentally, about the time I installed that Tunebite DRM removal program) My computer stopped waking up from sleep mode. I had it set to turn the monitor off after 20 minutes, and go into sleep mode in an hour. Now, once it goes into sleep mode nothing I do will wake it up and I have to force a hard reboot.

At this time I don't know for certain if it is just not re-animating the monitor (so the problem could happen after just 20 minutes) of if it has to be the full sleep thing. I'm going to test that now, I told it to never sleep and left the monitor setting at 20 minutes. In half an hour I'll know the answer to that one.

Meantime, is this a common problem with a known solution?

tanstaafl.

Edit: Half an hour later, the monitor came back to life with a touch of the mouse. So it looks like my original guess was correct -- it is the sleep mode that causes the problem.

The last time I had troubles with sleep mode, it turned out to be the video driver software. Upgrading to the latest driver for my ATI video chipset fixed the problem.

Of course, I was on a laptop, where "upgrading to the latest ATI chipset driver" was a bigger issue. If you're on a desktop system, no worries.

The DRM software remover installation is probably a coincidence. I don't imagine such a piece of software needs to install device drivers, services, or resident programs. But if it does, it might be worth looking into as a possible cause.

Tunebite has drivers which accelerate the reencoding process. It has a "high speed dubbing" driver which appears as a virtual sound card. No idea what it does for video. It might have something similar.

Good point. Perhaps the DRM-remover does so by playing through a high speed dubbing driver. (Doug, that's a thing that's similar to the "Total Recorder" product you're already familiar with.)

So I take back my comment that the DRM-remover is coincidence. It's worth investigating as a possible cause if it does, in fact, insert a driver as described above.

Actually... it inserts up to 56 of them. It can process 56 tracks simultaneously (28 if Perfect Audio is enabled). The speed advantage depends on whether your hardware is fast enough to take advantage.

I did a little research on the Tunebite users group board, found out a few things.

First, Tunebite disables sleep and hibernation while it is running. This is because, according to posts on the Tunebite forum, 100% of all audio tracks processed by Tunebite will be corrupted in sleep mode.

Second, Vista computers are less happy with Tunebite than XP computers, and have to process at 1x speed. This means if you are converting a single one-hour track, it will take... one hour. If you are converting 10 one-hour tracks simultaneously, it will take... one hour. Provided your hardware and RAM are up to the task. There is a registry tweak where Tunebite users can force it to 2x or 3x, but this is not endorsed by Tunebite, as YMMV depending on hardware.

I think my problem may be that if I run Tunebite, and then at any later time prior to re-booting allow the computer to go into sleep mode, it won't wake up again, probably because there is a bug in their sleep/hibernation procedure. I'll pose the question on the Tunebite board and see if I get any response. Meanwhile, I have turned off sleep mode in Vista, but left monitor shut-off as it has always been (20 minutes). Are there adverse effects from not allowing sleep mode? I usually turn the computer off if I'm not using it in any case.

tanstaafl.

There are the following adverse effects:

- The computer uses more electricity if it's left to sit idle for a long period of time and doesn't go to sleep.

- Computers wake from sleep mode more quickly than they do if you have turned them completely off; if you power it off instead of sleep it, it will take longer to start your next session.

That's all.

And the obvious: the computer uses more electricity when in sleep mode than when "fully" powered off.

Ditto for when using "soft" power off (the normal way), as opposed to *real* power off (switch on back, or unplugging, or switched outlet).

Quite astonishing, actually, when one measures the differences.

Cheers