Thursday, July 17, 2008

Hibernation issues

I think I have finally characterized a nasty problem with hibernation. It occurs on two different Windows laptops, with different versions of XP running on them. They are current, patch wise. Here are the steps to reproduce the mess.

  1. Have your laptop working with an ethernet network cable attached to it. Make sure traffic can flow through this connection.
  2. Without disconnecting the ethernet cable first, cause the laptop to hibernate.
  3. Then, resume the laptop from hibernation without connecting the ethernet cable.
At this point, the network subsystem may end up thinking it's still connected when it's not. Windows' network management will be hosed. You won't be able to enable / disable WiFi. You won't be able to recover the wireful ethernet network subsystem. Windows will still think the network cable is attached, and sometimes it will show amazing amounts of traffic going by --- with no cable attached, of course (!!!).

At this point you will have to reboot.

Why is this?

Posted by Andrés at 13:17

2 comments:

Stefan Schmiedl said...

Sounds more like a driver problem to me. I hibernate with connected cable-network and wake up without cable about twice a week and have no such problems with my Asus laptop.

17 July, 2008 13:57
Andres said...

Hmmm... interesting... now that I look at things better, both laptops seem to have an Intel 3945ABG wireless card... not sure about the wireful, but probably it's the same.

Drivers are up to date though... grrr...

Andres.

17 July, 2008 14:03

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