My combination of a Microsoft USB Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 and a Microsoft USB Dual Receiver Wireless Mouse was causing my PC to immediately wake after hibernating.  This was also causing S4 sleep mode in Vista to fail to wake up.

Normally the wireless mouse has a wireless keyboard as part of the package, but I'm only using the mouse so I think this was causing problems - my device manager showed two keyboards even though I only have one wired keyboard.

To fix this I ended up disabling both the keyboard and mouse (receiver) from being able to resume the PC.  You can do this using the command line tool powercfg.  Here's what I did:

powercfg -devicedisablewake "Microsoft USB Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 (IntelliType Pro) (001)"

powercfg -devicedisablewake "Microsoft USB Dual Receiver Wireless Keyboard (IntelliType Pro) (001)"

 

You can verify the device are disabled using: powercfg -devicequery wake_armed

 

After disabling both of those, S4 and hibernation started working again.

Setting up a new Windows development machine is a pain.  In fact it's more work than setting up a Linux development machine.  In Linux the package manager for the OS, the Rails package manager, and/or the Eclipse update manager handles most of this for me.  In Windows I'm forced to install things individually using separate installers.  Here's the minimum I had to install on my brand new Windows Vista box to get a decent development environment:

• Visual Studio 2005
• VS 2005 SP1
• VS 2005 SP1 patch for Vista
• Windows Vista SDK
• WCF for VS 2005
• .NET 1.1 Runtime (yes, I still have a project that compiles .NET 1.1)
• ReSharper 3 for C#
• SVN
• TortoiseSVN
• VisualSVN

That's just to get my machine compiling our code, that doesn't even include the numerous other tools I need to be productive like Paint.NET or MS Office.  All in all, I had to install around 30 applications yesterday!  No wonder I've been dragging my feet on getting a new system for the past month.  The good news is, I'm now done and this new 3GHz dual core system with 3GB or RAM freakin' rocks compared to my old Dell Dimension 4600.

I just bought an external Western Digitial 500GB MyBook hard drive that is capable of connecting through either eSATA or USB 2.0.  The drive only comes with a USB cable so I'm stuck using that until I got back to the store tomorrow to purchase a new eSATA cable.  I initially tried copying my source folder over to the drive (~1,8GB), but it was copying slower than I could check it out from SVN over the Internet.  Obviously something was wrong.  The culprit as it turns out was that the drive comes preformatted using FAT32 and I just tried using it as is.  Big mistake!  One NTFS reformat later and my drive is copying like a champ.

Just because I was asked today, here's the spec to my new PC:

• Antec Solara Sonata II case w/450 watt PS
• Intel Core2 CPU E6600 @ 2.4GHz
• ASUS P5B mainboard
• 2GB of DDR2 RAM
• 150GB SATA Western Digital 10,000rpm Raptor
• NVidia GeForce 8600GT
• Vista Business Pro 32bit (no Ubuntu yet...)
  

I mainly use this for development, but I also play some games.  Currently I'm catching up on Doom3 which I bought several years ago...

After spending all this money and time getting a new PC put together that was not only fast, but comparatively quiet, I was a little annoyed when I came home today and couldn't wake the PC up. All the fans and lights were on, but the video wouldn't display.  At first I thought it was a wireless keyboard and mouse driver issue, so I installed the latest MS drivers for them. Still it wouldn't sleep.  So then I thought it must be a power management or BIOS setting, but after combing through those and experimenting I didn't see anything that looked promising.  The one thing that did surprise me is that the default setting in the Vista pearl shutdown command is sleep rather than power off, which is the way it should be!

This made me wonder why my new PC was not in sleep mode when I came home today.  Last year I put together a new PC for my mom, and her PC went to sleep properly - i.e. no lights or fans running.  Clearly I had a sleep issue.  Long story short, it turned out I had two issues:

1. An old IEEE1334 card was forcing the system to power back on, but without any video display.  No amount of pounding on keys or pushing the power button would coerce it to do anything.
2. I had to go Into the Device Manager, find the mouse and keyboard, go to the properties on each one, go to the Power Management Tab, and UNCHECK "Allow this Device to wake the computer."

After I did those two things, I could properly put the system in sleep mode.  It seems to be using S4 fast sleep mode, because it powered back up almost instantaneously.  I feel much better now.

Its been a long while since I last purchased an entirely new PC, but today was the day that I finally replaced my trusty old Athlon XP based system.  I have a certain fondness for that computer, possibly because its been with me at every single employer I've had in the IT industry, thats a total of 4 employers over a span of 7 years.  Every single component except for the mainboard, the two hard drives, and the first 512MB of RAM have been replaced in that old system, in fact the power supply and the video card have been replaced twice over the years.  I think the longevity of the system was based largely on the uber reliable Gigabyte GA-7DXR mainboard, the two enormous (for the time) striped (RAID-0) 120GB Western Digital HDD's with 8MB cache, and a reliable install of Windows XP.  Now that I think about it, I can't believe I still have the original Windows install on that machine, especially when I consider the fact that I've had all sorts of beta software installed and uninstalled on that system over the years, and on top of that I've never had any anti-virus software.

Despite it being the longest living PC companion I've ever had, it was time to get a new one.  Things I hate about my old system:

• The system was getting pretty slow especially when running several instances of Visual Studio with Re#.
• The RAID controller never had a formal Windows XP driver, I was still using a Windows 2000 driver.
• No Vista support.
• The system would never power off.  If you tried to shut it down, it would turn off for 4 seconds then immediately power back on.
• The amount of noise from all the fans was absolutely mind numbing and constantly reminded me its cousin was a jet engine.

My new system seems to have fixed ALL of the issues I had with my previous Athlon system it replaced.  I took special care to pick out quiet, yet fast components and it seems to have paid off in a big way.  Not only can I not hear my PC anymore, but the speed is just fantastic.  Here's the Windows Experience Index score:

My daughter's Dell Inspiron 1150 fell victim once again to bargain basement laptop design and ended up
flat lined on my desk this weekend with its guts completely removed.

The Patient

The culprit was a week power receptacle that popped off the mother board and needed to be resoldered for a second time. 

The culprit

Unfortunately when my daughter has the laptop on her lap, the power cable sometimes gets upward pressure applied from her legs bumping the power cord.  With only weak solder holding the receptacle on the main board its no wonder this thing has popped off twice now.  My IBM Thinkpad would never have this problem, the receptacle on it is firmly attached to not only the mother board, like this Dell, but also the case - freaking brilliant!

Laptop Completely Disassembled

This time was going to be different.  This time I dremiled the case to make a bit more room for a new metal reinforcement piece on the top of the receptacle to provide support for the receptacle from upward forces popping it off the mother board.

Reinstalled Receptacle With New Reinforcement

If you look really closely you can see a tiny piece of shiny metal sticking out above the power receptacle, this is the new reinforcement piece I soldered to the top of the receptacle.