Off Topic: Sleep Mode, the Bane of My Existence

If I could boil down my long list of grievances towards various software and hardware companies it would probably be the sleep key on my keyboard and what it does to my desktop.

I have a highly specialized keyboard and mouse, ie a piece of crap that does everything I don’t want it to do. It’s wireless, and comes with a long list of features that I rarely use… volume controls, Skype buttons, zoom in/out (I REALLY hate those), pic button (what the heck is that for), LCD functions, and et cetera.

But none is more nefarious than the Sleep button. When my keyboard’s batteries run low I must flip the keyboard and add the fresh little bunny cylinders. Upon said flippage, the sleep button hit the desk and lo and behold it actually goes off, on low batteries.

So there I was, Windows moving into sleep mode on me. I hate sleep mode, why would I ever use it? Hibernate is just fine. So here I am keyboard low on batteries computer in sleep mode, everything dies down. I click on sleep mode again throwing the system into a sleep loop. No way to get out of it, the computer locks up. I have no way of getting out of it.

PANIC STRICKEN I hit reset. Throwing my whole computer into havoc. Upon boot up my user profile has been deleted. Favorites, desktop shortcuts, outlook rules (some 100 rules), email accounts, etc. all lost.

Wonderful. Even with the reshuffling of registry keys I still have about a half day’s worth of work to rebuild everything.

Thanks to my number one pet peeve: Sleep Mode Keys and XP.