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Comment by sprout | Hacker News Reader

I've got a Dell Vostro 1510 w/ Vista sitting in front of me, and coming out of sleep is "almost instant."

I know plenty of people are happy with Windows 7 and Vista but with me Windows has such a bad history of crashing/hanging while coming out of sleep/hibernation that I can't trust it.

Oh, I love Ubuntu and am never happy with anything but, but Windows Vista/7 have parity with Macs on resume, and way outpace Linux (if only because the hardware is built for Windows.)

My boss' Vostro was inexplicably hanging on logout/login, that seems to have corrected itself after a few forced reboots. (And I've had that experience a few times on all OS's, including OS X.) Actually, I can't remember it for Linux, but Ubuntu is much less careful about shutting down gracefully than Mac/Windows.

I don't think it's an issue anymore -- every modern machine I have right now (even a netbook running XP) is flawless coming out of sleep/hibernation. From my experience, the vast majority of windows laptop users almost never shutdown their computers.

I've had two machines: an HP DV5000 (AMD/ATI) model and a Macbook Pro. Both of them have not been reliable with sleep mode using a stock Windows XP/Vista install (plus drivers/updates). I haven't tried Windows 7 in sleep mode yet but it's not worth my time to risk losing work. I've only had OSX fail once due to a crash* in sleep mode in 2 years (and over a thousand sleep/wake cycles).

* I've had four failures to wake from sleep due to low battery in a 2 month span I was dealing with an old battery that was failing.

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