As regular readers know I've been caught in a battle between Windows Vista and my Toshiba M200 Tablet PC.
The root cause? nVidia's Vista drivers not turning the screen back on when resuming from sleep. In the whole beta program and up until now with the final version I had been using the Windows XP drivers Toshiba had posted on their website, largely without a hitch, but they are dated 2004, don't support Aero Glass and all the other nice things that WDDM drivers do support.
Anyway a few days ago I fired up Chess, and the system threw up a stop error, you can guess that nv_disp was mentioned somewhere in it. That was it I decided, time to use the Vista drivers and just use hibernate instead of sleep.
So I installed the latest Vista drivers 97.52 (with a modified inf so they actually install), rebooted and the screen wouldn't work at all. I tried some older versions with the same thing. So I System Restored back to how it was until I had time to sort it out.
That time came this evening, after about an hour, a system restore and a purge of everything nVidia I could find, I got the system back up and running, I think an old nVidia control panel was to blame, after installing Vista on my M200 I had gone through practically every driver version to see if sleep worked with any of them, I can't imagine the sort of mess that made of the system, when I installed Windows it only installed the standard VGA driver, I guess it felt there would be trouble ahead. But anyway I thought I was sorted, I was wrong.
Where's my hibernate option disappeared to? It was just gone. The hiberfil.sys had seemingly vanished. So I ran 'powercfg -h on' on an elevated command line, which turned hibernate back on. But that started the investigation as to what had turned it off.
After about 30 minutes of going through in my head everything I had done with the system, I realised this was the only machine I had run Disk Cleanup on.
There it is, delete the hibernation file. I must of checked that by accident when I ran it.
So this round of the battle is over. But I feel more in the months ahead. I want to be able to sleep without having to resort to drivers from the dark ages. Come on I know Toshiba don't support Windows Vista on the M200, but this is getting silly, nVidia I'm looking at you.