Hibernate fails "rarely"... HA!

In a previous post I mentioned that my work laptop had bit-rotted to the point of needing a format-and-reinstall. Since this was a company machine I at least had the advantage of an IS staff that had set up an image with all the stuff needed for the laptop. This brought me up from Windows 2000 to Windows XP.

For the most part I'm happy with XP so long as the whole activation thing is Somebody Else's Problem. There are some nice UI features, most likely stolen from Apple or someone who is innovative.

The one particular thing I was very happy about was that for the first time I had a machine that could successfully hibernate and then wake up correctly. This meant I could take the laptop to meetings instead of taking notes on paper (which I could then never find and never had time to transcribe into some searchable medium). Alas, this feature is no longer reliable.

I got a memory upgrade from 1GB to 2GB to support my extensive collection of VMWare virtual images. It seems that XP has problems hibernating if there's more than 1GB. It reserved the disk space just fine but something prevents it from actually working. I briefly thought I had found a fix for this problem but alas no. A google search for the error message I get turns up numerous people with the same problem.

Microsoft claims this happens "rarely". Which we all know means "it doesn't happen on any machine that Bill Gates uses".

So hibernate gets disabled and I'm back to having to wait for the interminable system shutdown before undocking.