The Humming Bag of Danger

My bag has started humming to itself. Scared me half to death when I first heard it at 3:00am. Scared me even more when I found out what it was.

Under Vista, if I ask my machine to Sleep it doesn't quite behave the same as it used to. Sometimes it wakes up. In my bag. Being wrapped in plastic doesn't do much for airflow, so the thing just sits there humming and getting hot. I'm sure it would shut down before it set fire to the house, but it is rather worrying.

Number one son has had the same thing happen with his Mac Portable, so this thing might be becoming common.  The way I see it, if you are putting your machine in your bag, you really should hibernate the device. This copies the entire memory to disk and then shuts down completely. The effect is similar to sleep, except that it takes a bit longer to wake up because the file has to be loaded off the disk when the power comes back on. With sleep the memory content is retained and so the machine can come back instantly. But it seems like computers are becoming lighter sleepers.....