Hibernation Problems

[codenamevirus]

Hi

I have a Acer Aspire 1640 customised notebook. It has Inter Pentium M Processor 1.73 Ghz, 2 GB ram. I think the motherboard is from the intel 915 mobile family.

It has Windows XP SP2 installed on it. The problem is when I try to hibernate, sometimes what happens is, the window saying preparing to hibernate comes, next the hibernating screen comes and then suddenly the windows desktop comes back with a warning "Insufficient memory to complete the API".

When this happens, the hibernate option from the shutdown menu is not present anymore, and i hav to shutdown or restart the machine!!

And this thing happens only when 2-3 applications are open....like if i hav a internet explorer window, ms word doc with msn n yahoo messenger signed in.

Whats the problem, why is it showin that way? My windows partition has 2 gb of empty space still left, apart from the hibernation space already reserved.

How to cure this one?

[nihil]

What is the total size of your Windows partition?

What are your pagefile settings?

What happens if you close the applications before hibernating?

You might keep an eye on what applications you have running and what order they were started in when this happens.

Obviously it is not an insufficient memory (RAM) problem

[codenamevirus]

What is the total size of your Windows partition?

Its 19.5 GB

What are your pagefile settings?

How to find that?

What happens if you close the applications before hibernating?

The laptop hibernates properly.

You might keep an eye on what applications you have running and what order they were started in when this happens.

I'll do that...but let me clear one thing, that when i said the IE, MSWORD, etc I was just giving an example. There has been a situation when none was on, like the messengers n IE etc were all closed and only the DreamWeaver application was working with the windows calculator and a notepad txt file when the samething happened! So, i m not sure, whether its due to some particular applications or just coz multiple applications were working when I hibernated!!


Thanks

[nihil]

OK, the first and obvious problem is that you do not have enough free space on your Windows partition.

Ideally it should be at least 20% of the total, so I would recommend getting rid of rubbish, archiving stuff and then defragmenting.

This is a good (free) tool:

http://www.ccleaner.com/

As you know, the pagefile is HDD space used to supplement RAM. A lot of nonsense is talked about this, with people suggesting "magic ratios" of pagefile to physical RAM. The truth of the matter is that there is no "correct" amount.

As you have 2Gb of RAM you would need much less pagefile than someone with 256Mb.

By default, Windows tends to set something like 1.5x RAM. As you obviously haven't altered yours, I would guess that it may be set way too high for what you really need.

Go into <control panel>, <system>, <advanced>, <performance options>, <virtual memory> and see what it is set to.

I realise that you were just giving an example of running applications. I suggested that you keep an eye on this as it sometimes happens that if you shutdown or hibernate with applications running in a particular order you can get a conflict.

[Ignatius]

codenamevirus:

Check your pagefile (also known as Virtual Memory) settings by

R click My Computer > Properties > Advanced tab > Performance Settings button > Advanced tab > Virual Memory (is given) and can be changed by clicking the Change button.

[nihil]

Apparently this is a known problem with laptops with more than 1Gb of memory. MS have a patch for it, but you have to go and get it for yourself, it is not part of the standard releases.

MS article is here.............link to patch is at the bottom:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=909095

You still need to free up more space in your Windows partition

[Cider]

Nihil: tell me what work you do exactly where you have all this freetime to answer all these arb posts (mine included)

[nihil]

Hey Cider,

It isn't free time as much as time management. I mostly work from home so I log a machine on and have a look at it whilst I am waiting for something to finish.

Also, a lot of these things are problems that I encounter on a day to day basis so I already have possible solutions and links to stuff.

[codenamevirus]

Hi nihil

I freed some space on the windows partition, it has now 5.2 GB empty. I think that'll be enough!! Installing the patch on the link u gave!

Will defrag the machine soon, when i get some free time!

I checked the pagefile setting. Paging file size for the Windows Partition was set to a custom size....with Initial Size being 3057 MB and Maximum Size being 3500 MB.

And in the "Total paging file size for all drives", the Minimum size allowed is 2 MB, Recommended 3057 MB, Currently Allocated 3057 MB.

What changes should i make?

[nihil]

Hi codenamevirus,

That seems excessive to me. You might try setting both values to 2048, just keep an eye on your performance monitor, although I wouldn't expect any problems with 2 Gigs .

You will now have a fixed pagefile. I like them that way because they don't fragment.

Another thing I do is set the pagefile to clear on shutdown. This means that potentially sensitive data like passwords in plaintext are not stored and I start with a clean sheet on bootup. It does make shutdown take a bit longer.

Here is how:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314834