The Humming Bag of Danger

My bag has started humming to itself. Scared me half to death when I first heard it at 3:00am. Scared me even more when I found out what it was.

Under Vista, if I ask my machine to Sleep it doesn't quite behave the same as it used to. Sometimes it wakes up. In my bag. Being wrapped in plastic doesn't do much for airflow, so the thing just sits there humming and getting hot. I'm sure it would shut down before it set fire to the house, but it is rather worrying.

Number one son has had the same thing happen with his Mac Portable, so this thing might be becoming common.  The way I see it, if you are putting your machine in your bag, you really should hibernate the device. This copies the entire memory to disk and then shuts down completely. The effect is similar to sleep, except that it takes a bit longer to wake up because the file has to be loaded off the disk when the power comes back on. With sleep the memory content is retained and so the machine can come back instantly. But it seems like computers are becoming lighter sleepers.....

Comments

[Adam]

Vista (for laptops et al) has a hybrid sleep mode; basically, if you tell it to go to sleep, after a predefined time, it will wake itself up from sleep, and hibernate itself. Possible that your machine is somehow getting stuck after waking itself up? I think hybrid sleep is configurable, so should be disablable.

Macintoshes have a similar thing called safesleep (though it doesn't kick in until the device has lost power completely). They've also had the ability to wake themselves up autonomously for the last decade or so though :P
Usual culprit is some rogue settings, resetting the PRAM and NVRAM (and the SMC on newer models) should send it back to a deep and restful sleep.