Raymond Chen recently pointed to this article on analyzing performance problems when entering standby mode and resuming in Vista. Besides the complete crippling of Windows Explorer, standby and hibernation have been the two most significant issues I've had with Vista, so I decided to give this a try and see if I could find out what was going on.
My basic problem is not that standby or hibernation fail to work. I've been pretty lucky here and both work fairly flawlesly. The problem is, they take a boatload of time. For example, entering standby mode usually takes around 20 seconds, which is totally unacceptable. Entering hibernation (which is a feature I've always loved since the Win2K days) is even worse, taking about 5 minutes, which is 2-3x the time it used to take in WinXP (on the exact same machine, with 2 GB or RAM).
I have no idea what causes or what to do about the hibernation issue, but using the technique described in the article pointed by Raymond I was able to discover what seems to be some of the culprits:
Is this stuff interesting? Yes, very much so. Can I do anything about it? Sure doesn't look like it. Closing stuff like Outlook or the Virtual PC image I keep almost 100% of the time open and running sure doesn't seem useful. After all, if I close them, I end up with all useful stuff closed, so I might as well just shut down the machine, instead!
