Why Windows is bad for laptops

[Gogf]

WARNING: The following contains a rant expressing my frustration with an incredibly stupid "feature" of Windows. This is a long post.

I'm in a hotel in Florida and so my only access to Civ4 is through my parents' Dell laptop. Well, my experience with this thing have reinforced my hatred of Windows.

I'm playing a 1v1 MP game on the laptop. I have a great start, and the game is going well. Suddenly, there is a short lag as the game minimizes. A popup comes out of nowhere telling me that the battery is below 10%. Now, this is reasonable. I want to know before my computer runs out of battery.

I press "okay" hoping to get back into the game before much happens. Rather than allowing me to get back into the game, I get a message telling me that the computer is "preparing to hibernate." This message soon disappears and the computer promptly goes to sleep. When I turned the computer back on, it froze on one of those black screens with meaningless text, and a large red message at the buttom popped up. The message told me that I was below 10% battery power, and I had to hit "F1" to continue.

This is ridiculous. The computer should never go off or "hibernate" unless I tell it to. The reason that laptops have batterys is so that they don't have to be perpetually plugged in. Why should the computer randomly shut off just because it's not plugged in? Why should I get this stupid message before turning on the computer that tells me it's at less than 10% battery? I already know this, that's why the thing is turned off to begin with. Not only that, but the moment the computer is back on I'm going to know anyway because it gives me one of those annoying taskbar speach bubble popups telling me that it's at less than 10% battery. I'd also like to point out that I have no idea how much time "10% battery life" actually is.

Let me contrast this mess with the Mac system:

Once I get below one hour of battery life left, the icon that shows me how much time I have left turns red. If I get down to ten minutes left, I get a popup telling me that I am now running on reserve battery power. The computer doesn't shut itself off, and I only get one message.

 

[Mylon]

My laptop doesn't have an easy way to check the battery while playing a game that takes the whole screen. That warning message is a good time to telle me before it turns off completely. Besides that, I've been in several situations where the computer hibernates while playing a game and I can easily resume playing once the computer is restored from hibernation.

I haven't spontaneously lost data (or play time) due this, so I've been fairly happy with the performance of my (Windows) laptop.

 

[MarineCorps]

WARNING: The following contains a rant expressing my frustration with an incredibly stupid "feature" of Windows. This is a long post.

I'm in a hotel in Florida and so my only access to Civ4 is through my parents' Dell laptop. Well, my experience with this thing have reinforced my hatred of Windows.

I'm playing a 1v1 MP game on the laptop. I have a great start, and the game is going well. Suddenly, there is a short lag as the game minimizes. A popup comes out of nowhere telling me that the battery is below 10%. Now, this is reasonable. I want to know before my computer runs out of battery.

I press "okay" hoping to get back into the game before much happens. Rather than allowing me to get back into the game, I get a message telling me that the computer is "preparing to hibernate." This message soon disappears and the computer promptly goes to sleep. When I turned the computer back on, it froze on one of those black screens with meaningless text, and a large red message at the buttom popped up. The message told me that I was below 10% battery power, and I had to hit "F1" to continue.

This is ridiculous. The computer should never go off or "hibernate" unless I tell it to. The reason that laptops have batterys is so that they don't have to be perpetually plugged in. Why should the computer randomly shut off just because it's not plugged in? Why should I get this stupid message before turning on the computer that tells me it's at less than 10% battery? I already know this, that's why the thing is turned off to begin with. Not only that, but the moment the computer is back on I'm going to know anyway because it gives me one of those annoying taskbar speach bubble popups telling me that it's at less than 10% battery. I'd also like to point out that I have no idea how much time "10% battery life" actually is.

Let me contrast this mess with the Mac system:

Once I get below one hour of battery life left, the icon that shows me how much time I have left turns red. If I get down to ten minutes left, I get a popup telling me that I am now running on reserve battery power. The computer doesn't shut itself off, and I only get one message.

Start menu---> Control panel--->display----> screen saver---->Power options. One of the tabs allows you to adjust the percent at which the computer goes on standby. MY brothers is set at 3%.

 

[Speedo]

This is ridiculous. The computer should never go off or "hibernate" unless I tell it to.

Then disable hibernation.

"Thou shalt look for the setting before thy rant speweth forth."

Recovering from hibernation was FUBAR'd, I'm sure, because you had Civ running. Hibernation dumps the entire contents of your memory to the HDD, then attempts to reload everything when you turn it back on. I have little doubt that Civ was unhappy with this situation.

 

[FriendlyFire]

Lucky your not a MAC user:

You probably would have killed someone by now

 

[Dabomb18359]

WARNING: The following contains a rant expressing my frustration with an incredibly stupid "feature" of Windows. This is a long post.

I'm in a hotel in Florida and so my only access to Civ4 is through my parents' Dell laptop. Well, my experience with this thing have reinforced my hatred of Windows.

I'm playing a 1v1 MP game on the laptop. I have a great start, and the game is going well. Suddenly, there is a short lag as the game minimizes. A popup comes out of nowhere telling me that the battery is below 10%. Now, this is reasonable. I want to know before my computer runs out of battery.

I press "okay" hoping to get back into the game before much happens. Rather than allowing me to get back into the game, I get a message telling me that the computer is "preparing to hibernate." This message soon disappears and the computer promptly goes to sleep. When I turned the computer back on, it froze on one of those black screens with meaningless text, and a large red message at the buttom popped up. The message told me that I was below 10% battery power, and I had to hit "F1" to continue.

This is ridiculous. The computer should never go off or "hibernate" unless I tell it to. The reason that laptops have batterys is so that they don't have to be perpetually plugged in. Why should the computer randomly shut off just because it's not plugged in? Why should I get this stupid message before turning on the computer that tells me it's at less than 10% battery? I already know this, that's why the thing is turned off to begin with. Not only that, but the moment the computer is back on I'm going to know anyway because it gives me one of those annoying taskbar speach bubble popups telling me that it's at less than 10% battery. I'd also like to point out that I have no idea how much time "10% battery life" actually is.

Let me contrast this mess with the Mac system:

Once I get below one hour of battery life left, the icon that shows me how much time I have left turns red. If I get down to ten minutes left, I get a popup telling me that I am now running on reserve battery power. The computer doesn't shut itself off, and I only get one message.

First of all, Windows doesn't randomly display this message. You have to set it to do so. You can make it so that you get no warning messages until the thing is completely out of battery.

Second of all, the message telling you that it's below 10% does serve a point. Maybe after it hibernated you decided to get off for a little. Say your parents got on their laptop. Not knowing that you wore it down to below 10%, wouldn't they like to know?

I know, I'm not defending Windows. It's very gay sometimes (well, more than that) but it has some reasoning behind what it does.