On the Soapbox

Normally, when I run into some problem or some sort of quirky behavior with some piece of software, I'll just curse at it, get frustrated, get annoyed, and then accept that it's just how it is. Unless the problem is fairly disruptive, blatantly a bug, or obviously something that I can fix myself, I usually don't give it much thought after the obligatory round of grumbling.

But every now and then, I do get frustrated enough at the minor quirks that I end up trying to fix it, and if it's a problem with Windows, then that means a trip to the Microsoft Knowledge Base (MSKB). It's a treasure trove, and over the years, I have almost always found a KB article that addresses the exact issue that I experienced. Yet, despite this, I have never have gotten into the habit of using MSKB. Whenever I encounter a minor quirk, I tend to automatically accept it as just a part of life, and it often doesn't even occur to me that there may be a fix for this minor thing, and worst of all, this dismissal happens automatically, without me even realizing it.

Anyway, to save power and to reduce the amount of heat produced, I often put my laptop in a sleep mode if I'm not using it for an extended period of time. The problem with this is that every time the laptop comes out of sleep, the network connection sometimes behaves strangely for a short while (less than a minute), and once I bring the laptop out of sleep, I can't put it back to sleep immediately. I have to wait a little bit before I can do that. And all this time, it never occurred to me that this is a problem that could be fixed; I had just thought that this was a natural and normal part of sleeping and waking the laptop and that perhaps the OS needs to perform some tasks after being reactivated from sleep. Well, as it turns out, KB308467 addresses this exact issue. Offers an explanation of why it happens and how to work around it. And now, I can sleep and wake my laptop without any quirky network behavior and the process is now virtually instantaneous: takes about a second to put it to sleep and about a second to wake it up. Neat, huh?

And the problem of some optical drives mysteriously entering PIO mode? Although I've had this happen to me only once, I've seen this happen to other people back when I used to moderate an optical drive forum. We never thought much of it since it was a relatively rare thing. Turns out there's a fix for that too from the MSKB...