So, ithaqua is unusable once more. This means reviving dagon, my old Dell Inspiron 3800, yet again (not to mention being relieved that I never got rid of the manky old machine).

Don't get me wrong - dagon is a perfectly decent box. It's just that it's a bit... temperamental.

The single most annoying feature of dagon is that it can't go to sleep and wake up again reliably. Quite apart from the slowness, it has never been very good at this - when I ran Windows on it, I would use the sleep or hibernate function and it would frequently fail to wake up. The behaviour under Linux using APM is better, but dagon still fails to wake up maybe 10% of the time. Indeed, this rather unreliable sleep/wake stuff was one of the primary reasons why I wanted to get the iBook.

In theory, dagon has an ACPI-capable BIOS although in practice I haven't made this work yet either. Since ithaqua had been behaving itself of late, I had stopped trying. I'll have another go this weekend because I hate being without a laptop, and because I've found some more information on ACPI sleep which I did not have before.

Unfortunately, the general sense I get at the moment is that however flaky APM might be (and it truly is), ACPI support is still deeply flawed. I have not seen any Windows laptop user really use their laptop's lid switch like you can with a working Apple laptop, for example, so I can see that I might end up just sticking with APM on dagon because it works most of the time. And I know dagon's tempers.

Posted by Dunx at April 22, 2004 03:16 PM