Hi there everyone:
These days I'm looking for a utility to help me track and proactively resolve problems when I try to suspend my laptop.
read on:
Sometimes when I close the laptop lid, a program may be running that will prevent windows from going into suspend mode, or whatever other reason, and the machine doesn't suspend and I have to open the lid up and try doing suspend again.
For example: Samsung printer 'smart panel' or some freeware that I use that is written as a tray application (system service?) but doesn't exit gracefully when the system is trying to shutdown. I don't know why it is, but about 30% of the time when I have nothing queued up for my printer and I'm just trying to shut my laptop lid, this taskbar utility seems to hang when I want to suspend my box. Some programs are historically a pain in the neck in this regards. Previous versions of the Pidgin IM client sometimes would be problematic.
Now I know some of you might be apt to think since this sounds like an issue where if the program is misbehaving that the core of the issue is the particular program which needs to be dealt with, and not some roundabout solution. However, some programs do get eventually corrected (thank you Pidgin) and some are just repeat offenders that don't get corrected because of whatever reasons. Maybe everyone is working on Vista support even though I'm not the only one using XP, right? :-D
Action plan:
I wonder if there is a script that, if my computer is suspending and an offending program shows up: instead of *just* poping up "This program is no longer responding" it could display a countdown timer [in this case I would push the suspend button instead of just slamming the laptop shut so that my monitor could show me this] where if I click the button it will prevent the program from being terminated. Otherwise, the program will be terminated.
Since not all programs are created equal, and one may have the next great American novel in a unresponding instance of MS Office, obviously the proactive suspend assist program user wouldn't want to kill Word. Some programs always will be problematic, like the 'smart panel' I mention above, and terminating them doesn't pose a big consequence on the system or your data.
There are some future possibilities for such a program like this:
For this case, 'the suspender' assist program could track the programs which have posed a problem when suspending or even *restarting* or *shutting down* for each time a user tried to suspend their machine. Permitting a user to later browse this information overlayed on a calendar widget or something, with maybe some process data about what they were running in addition, a user could better understand what about their computer caused the program to suspend [if user behaviour is the issue? or is it a rogue process? ] or to know how often a program suspends [ie: "3 times in the last week! this is unacceptable"]. Though these features probably make sense to include in a v2 or v3 of the utility.
Hope that's useful and not overkill.
