Re: tlug: Sony VAIO & apm

["Manuel M. T. Chakravarty" <chak@example.com>]

Frank Bennett <bennett@example.com> wrote,

> I've had an interesting morning.  I couldn't find my recovery CD
> for the VAIO, so I called up Customer Support.  The woman I spoke
> with first stopped me in my tracks when I told her I had
> installed Linux.  Unfortunately, she said, they only support
> Windows 95, Windows 98 and NT on the VAIO.  No Unix support.  I
> suggested that a partition on the hard disk generated by a
> standalone utility that was supplied to them by Phoenix with the
> BIOS was independent of the operating system, but she wouldn't
> wear it.  I proposed that Sony was refusing to provide service
> for one of their products.  She said yes, that was about the size
> of it.  I hung up.
> 
> I called back again after I'd cooled off a bit, and spoke with
> another rep.  I suggested that, since other companies made the
> PHDISK.EXE utility available for the BIOS installed in their
> machines, Sony might consider doing the same.  I kept him on the
> line long enough for him to make himself useful, but ... he
> didn't.  He did say that he would make a note of my suggestion
> that things on the recovery CD that CAN be thrown open without
> fear of legal action should be mounted to the Web.  And that was
> the end of my second conversation with the Sony customer service
> department.
> 
> So it seems that if you lose your recovery CD, Sony no longer
> wants to know about you, or your problems.  This raises feelings
> in me that I can only safely express in the confines of a
> soundproof box (or on the Advocacy channel).

I wonder whether they would have given you, say, a new CD if 
you had claimed that you screwed up your partitioning while
running one of the M$ OSes...

> Happily, I had another rummage through my boxes, and found the
> CD.  I've located PHDISK.EXE, used it to create a partition on
> the hard disk from a DOS boot floppy, and confirmed that
> hibernation now works.  Hurray!
> 
> Almost.  I left the machine running when I went out for lunch,
> and on my return I found that a timed hibernation had (as
> sometimes happened in the past) left the machine powered up (if
> the LED is to be believed) but with the screen off and the HDD
> spindled down -- and locked solid as an iceberg.  Nothing in my
> BIOS settings was configured to power down the screen or the
> disk, so I guess that's what a botched hibernation attempt looks
> like.
> 
> There is a manual hibernation key on the VAIO, which now seems to
> work.  I've tried saving and restoring by hand a few times, and
> it hasn't locked up (yet).  We'll see how things go from here.
> But I think we don't allow timed hibernation anymore.  Once
> burned twice shy.

I'll definitely try setting up the hibernation partition on
my VAIO when I install Linux next time (when is TL3.0J said
to be released...)  I have experience with a 505 and a 726
and they definitely differ wrt. to the behaviour that can be
configured with the APM BIOS settings.  The 505 always
suspends when I close the lid (no way to prevent it), while
the 726 allows you to disable this behaviour.

However, both machines definitely don't do a timed suspend
if this is disabled -- could be quite annoying, eg, in a
talk presented using a SVGA projector.  BTW, it would be
rather useful to change these BIOS setting while the machine
is up and running, not only during boot time - but, I guess,
there is no way to do this, is there?

Anyway, thanks very much for your explanations about
hibernation on the VAIO.

Manuel
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