This must be hardware ... mustn't it ?

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Windows Live writer is proving popular. I've been using it in beta for a year and there are only two things that I don't like

  • I can't seem to get a UK English spell check.
  • The "Auto-save" feature is off by default.

The Auto-save is matters at this point, because in place of the witty and erudite post I was writing yesteday (and I was borrowing from something I had listened to from Clive James) you have this one.I never turned Auto-save on. And last night when unzipped my bag, I could smell that my post was toast. Toast being the key word here - though the smell was not the comforting one of bread browning, but the distinctive tang of hot plastic. I knew before I touched the computer was hot. With no LEDs on there was a slim chance the computer had hibernated but I've seen this before it came as no surprised it had run that battery to zero. Recently, too judging from the heat - I was concerned that it might have damaged the machine  made me a little concerned for it (doubly so as I hadn't removed the secondary drive after doing my last backup). Since the laptop had been in my car for last 3-4 hours and most of that time the car had been parked on the driveway, and this isn't the first time it's happened I want to know what's going on here. According to the event log it woke up at 18:53 and this was triggered by the ACPI Lid. What's odd about this is that the laptop doesn't power up when I open the lid I have to press the power button.  Worse, closing the lid sends it to sleep ONLY when running on battery.

Looking through the event log I found when the machine boots, the event logging service records an Error 6008 - "The previous system shutdown at {time} was unexpected.", if it wasn't shut down cleanly. Now I don't know how it works out the time it happened.  There are 5 of these events in the last 40 days.  Roughly two hours before each is a message recorded by Power-Troubleshooting . "The system has resumed from sleep. Sleep Time: {time} Wake Time: {time}. Wake Source: Device -ACPI Lid"

I'd love to hear from anyone out there who has a Dell Latitude D820 which seems to have a problem of this kind. One hypothesis I'm working on is that this a scheduled service is waking the computer up (maybe to record something a 7PM) and the switch message is spurious, and it may be that if the machine wakes with it's lid closed something about the state of the lid switch then prevents it from sleeping - whether this is a bug or a hardware fault.

Feels like I've got to do a load more investigation before I even call the help desk.

 

Update. After a quick swap of hard disks between my laptop and Steve's the failure to sleep on closing lid when powered follows the drive not the chassis. Vista is definitely set-up to sleep in both states. But it's something on the hard disk .