Toshiba Laptop and Windows Vista Hibernation… Recipe for a Dead Battery

New laptop, a Toshiba A505 with Windows Vista Home (ugg) but a free upgrade to Windows 7 is pending.  This one replaces my five year old HP Pavillion, retired now.

Now, I’m a newbie to Vista, but not to laptops. I regularly hibernated the old HP without any major issues (until it died after hibernating with a completely blown partition table, but that’s another story).

Imagine my surprise when I put the Toshiba away at night (in its’ laptop case) and wake the next day to find a very hot laptop in that case with a dead battery.

Seems that something comes on in the wee hours of the morning and wakes up the hardware, even though it is on battery power, and proceeds to run things like Windows update!  The verdict is out on exactly what is causing this (prime candidate is Windows Update itself) , but clearly in my case either Toshiba or Microsoft has dropped the ball in configuring these laptops.

No way should this behavior happen out of the box and no way any normal user should be expected to figure this one out. Poor quality control on someone’s part for sure. Since more than the Toshiba brand seem to be impacted (see article linked to above), my money is on Microsoft as the culprit. Aarrghh!

One Response to “Toshiba Laptop and Windows Vista Hibernation… Recipe for a Dead Battery”

  1. Helphand says:

    Well, eat crow time. Seems that Windows Update is not the problem after all. At this point I have two suspects left, 1) the hardware setting for the USB mouse was set to permit it to wake up the system, or 2) the Toshiba installed drivers that allow power to USB ports when the system is turned off. I have disabled both and the problem has gone away (even with Windows Update enabled or disabled). Still trying to figure out which one is the real culprit…

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