Thanks Richard. Good news though on Power Chute. I emailed apc and they
said there is a downloadable version of Power Chute that works on vista.
Here is the link.
http://apc.com/tools/download/software_comp.cfm?sw_sku=SFPCPE210&id=129&swfam=129
It is free > which is nice.
<snip>
I originally installed the XP version of Powerchute Personal Edition, for an
APC UPS connected by USB, in Vista Ultimate. It worked fine. I did then
upgrade to the Vista version and am having problems. It goes into
hibernation ok, but on resuming from hibernation, when it gets to the login
screen, the system shuts off suddenly as if the power was cut off.
I have tested hibernation directly, without the intervention of Powerchute,
and it enters/resumes from hibernation just fine. So the issue is with the
driver installed with Powerchute.
Other users of the Vista version report on the APC user forum other problems
such as mainserve.exe using 50% CPU, mainserve.exe having a memory leak
resulting in large amounts of memory usage, and the settings in Powerchute
on how long to run on battery when the power is cut before shutting down
being ignored with the system entering hibernation after 5 minutes instead
of waiting until there is only 5 minutes battery life remaining.
I haven't experienced these three issues, but it doesn't want to resume
nicely from hibernation induced by Powerchute. In fact the first time I
tested it right after it was installed, when it shut down at the login
screen, on restart it again attempted to resume from hibernation, went to
the login screen, allowed a login, then hung at loading the desktop
requiring a hard reboot. On the next restart it started as from a cold
start and logged in ok. Checkdisk showed some problems on the system
volume, but not the boot volume and, strangely enough, on only one of
several data partitions. I turned off hibernation to delete the
hiberfil.sys file, re-enabled it, did a couple of reboots and tested twice
again.
On both subsequent tests when resuming from hibernation it shut the computer
down while typing at the login screen, then on a restart it started as from
a cold start, not from a hibernation resume, and allowed a normal login to a
normal desktop. Chkdsk showed no disk corruption from the abnormal
shutdowns.
So if you go with the Vista version make sure you test it and be aware of
these potential problems.