Thoughts From the Air
I am writing this at 35,000 feet, high above the Midwest and enjoying the tunes on my iPhone. The flight is totally full, and there’s not an inch of free space anywhere. I was lucky enough to get a window seat in the exit row, so my seatmates and I have plenty of room.
The gentleman in my row has been working the entire flight. The moment it was permitted, he pulled a 15-inch Dell laptop out of his bag, and he’s been working in a ginormous Excel spreadsheet for a good while. It reminds me of my corporate world days, working in a giant spreadsheet. I don’t miss those days at all.
The guy’s Dell laptop is running Windows XP, likely because it’s a company notebook. When he took it out of his bag, he booted it up and waited for that to complete since it had been powered off. I don’t understand why folks don’t use Standby all the time. He could have been up in a few seconds, instead of the minute it took. That sounds like nitpicking, and maybe it is, but it’s a total waste of battery power. He was sweating over the remaining battery life by the end of the flight, too.
This flight doesn’t have Wi-Fi, which is a shame. I have yet to fly on a connected flight, and I would like to do so. While it’s not totally bad to be disconnected and listening to tunes while I write this, I could be watching Hulu. :)
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Coach? No way, Jose.
You have to turn of all electronic equipment before takeoff…
Technically you are not supposed to leave stuff in sleep mode, “Off means off, not sleep, not hibernate, OFF!” I had a flight attendant yell that out in a flight, people looked pretty scared of her! :)
Yes, I remember her. Buffy The Passenger Slayer.
lol What the hell? Hibernate is equivalent to off. From a zero input standpoint it’s exactly the same. Retarded airline people these days -_-;
It seems to me that as long as all radios are off when the laptop is “slept” then that’s good enough. The device technically is off at that point. Just the memory is being powered.
Hibernate is practically the same as off, in terms of energy use and potential disruption to anything else.
However, Windows tends to be extremely variable about how it wakes up. Usually it takes several seconds from sleep, or about a minute from hibernate. However, I just woke up my laptop (running Vista SP1) after leaving it hibernated for over half a week, and it took several minutes to wake up. It might have been faster to boot from scratch. And then it’s Patch Tuesday again. Sigh.
I see good sleep behavior as a major advantage that Macs have over PCs.
Of course, most people don’t know they’re supposed to sleep laptops, even when Microsoft makes sleep the default behavior for the big shut down button in Vista’s Start menu, and most OEMs including Apple make sleep the default when you just close the lid: How much easier can you make it? I figure that people are used to abuse, and not curious about what they haven’t been told.
I leave my TC1100 in sleep/hibernate most of the time, and it wakes up pretty quickly.
As for Wi-Fi flights, I actually had one while returning from my Washington/Oregon vacation, but it costs money, so I declined. (20 US$ every Thursday for lunch is about the most income this college student gets.) That, and my TC1100 only gets an hour and 45 minutes of battery life on the single battery it was supplied with-not nearly enough for what was roughly a 5-hour flight.
OTOH, I vaguely recall another passenger doing a bit of Web surfing through an iPhone/iPod touch, and yet another passenger playing an online RTS with his laptop. They seemed to work without a hitch.
@ James:
So if there was no inflight wi-fi, how exactly were you able to post this? I’m not familiar with the rules regarding data transmissions on flights.
I wrote it in an editor and posted when I got to the ground.
Hibernate is off. The only difference is that Windows saves its memory to hard drive before turning off the power. Standby is a low power state, but it is not the same as turning off.
Standby is all well and good too, until the laptop turns on by itself in your case and proceeds to heat up until it runs out of the cracks of the case in the form of hot, molten plastic. :p
I go with Hibernate myself. It takes a few seconds longer to boot, but it uses even less power than standby and is guaranteed to not self-activate.
On those older dells, often neither standby nor hibernate work well. They can drain the already poor batteries, and sometimes they never wake up without a hard reboot, especially with XP.
Anyone else had that problem? I love my light-sleeping mac.
Yeah I’ve had some lappies that slept no problem and others that were a nightmare…