Sunday, July 01, 2012

Windows 7 - Resuming from hibernation is slow on Thinkpad

This post describes the solution to a hibernation issue I had with Lenovo Thinkpad L412 laptop running Windows 7.

When waking up from hibernation the system resumed relatively fast, but then, for a minute or two after resuming, many applications (e.g. Explorer, Firefox) would be "not responding".

Additional symptoms:

  • During this period the disk activity was unexpectedly high, Resource Monitor indicated that most of it was paging (see the high "Hard faults" figure, and the c:\pagefile.sys requests on the screenshot), even though there was more than enough RAM available before hibernating.
  • The task manager also showed a drop in memory utilization -- the system used fewer memory after hibernating and resuming than before.

The program to blame for this behavior turned out to be this fine piece of software engineering:

"ThinkVantage Technologies Power Manager 6"

Just uninstall it and the problem is gone. You'll lose the large battery widget in the task bar and the confusing power management UI that mostly duplicates existing Windows functionality:

(If anyone wonders. the latest version at the time of writing (6.32) had this problem too.)

Troubleshooting tips that helped to identify the issue can be found here: Trace Windows 7 boot/shutdown/hibernate/standby/resume issues.