My home machine runs Windows Vista. I know, I must have been bad in a previous life or something. I actually have no real problem with MS’s fancy new OS; the user account control is very much like the same thing you get in Linux so that doesn’t really bother me, and since service pack 1 the speed of certain directory listing and file copying operations have improved significantly. Perhaps the people that complain about Vista are doing a lot of real work on their machine, whereas the most complex thing my Vista box gets to do is run Team Fortress 2.
And therein lies the problem.
I’d noticed that Vista wouldn’t go into sleep mode via the time limit set in the screen saver page. Vista’s problems with sleep are well documented on the web (just google for Vista insomnia and you’ll see), though the symptoms of this problem were subtly different, in that I could manually send the computer to sleep and it would happily stay there, and recover without a hitch. After fruitlessly fiddling about with the various power settings suggested on pages I found via google, I started to wonder if it was any of the background applications that prevented the machine from entering the idle state, and hit the answer first time: if you exit Steam, sleep mode works fine.
So there you go: gamers, if your computer is having problems sleeping, try turning off Steam.
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