Windows Vista’s shutdown/sleep/hibernate models have changed quite a bit from previous Windows versions. Do a quick search to get more information. Here’s a good description of some of the potential problems, and here’s a good walkthrough on how to configure the settings.

Out of the box Vista’s power management is configured with what’s called a “Balanced” power plan. The Balanced power plan tries to do just that: balance low power usage (energy savings) with availability (performance). The biggest problem I’ve run into with Balanced (or “Power saver”, or any plan that puts your computer into sleep mode at all, for that matter) is that when I wake my computer back up, the network connection remains asleep, and it doesn’t come back again. I have to reboot to get it to reconnect (which defeats the purpose of sleep mode). As someone who works remotely on frequent occasions, the fact that I’m suddenly unable to connect to my computer after an hour or so is just ridiculous. When I am in my office, and I bring Vista out of sleep mode, I’ve instantly got 3-5 applications all frantically trying to reconnect to their servers, none of which are able.

Perhaps I’m missing a setting that will let my computer wake up via the network, but if I’m missing it so are a lot of other people out there. (If you know it, please leave a comment to give me a clue!) Given how frequently I connect to my machine from a remote location, forcing my computer into sleep mode won’t really save me a ton of energy so in my case, the solution was simply to change my power plan to “High performance” which essentially keeps it on all the time. You can find your Power plans via your Control Panel (the Power Options icon).

I still don’t know what I think (overall) about Vista’s sleep mode…