Greg M. Johnson's furious key-hammering produced this:
> 3) The new PC went into a sleep mode by the next morning, a harder, deeper
> sleep, and I know it does so after a much shorter time than the old one.

That's the cause of the inconsistancies.

> Perhaps the folks who design sleep modes  never consider you might need to
> do some CPU-intensive stuff while you're away: they probably figure that if
> you're not typing at the word processor, you have absolutely no need for the
> CPU at all.

If the computer's sleep state were based on CPU usage the system would never
enter sleep mode.  Any OS you use has to constantly run through instructions in
order to keep the system running smoothly.  Take a quick look in your Windows
task manager (go to the performance tab and don't move the mouse at all).
You'll notice that the processor utilization hangs between 0% and 2%.  Remember
that, even though you aren't going anything, background processes and services
still need a small chunk of CPU time to do their thing.

Knowing that, you could argue that CPU utilization can be checked before the
computer drops into sleep mode.  I don't believe this is easily possible.  CPU
utilization is (I believe) an abstraction made by software based on how it
divides CPU time between the various tasks that are running.  Implementing
something like this in a computer's BIOS would probably be impossible without
changing the entire architecture to the point of having the BIOS handle multi-
tasking, a choice that would be very expensive and not allow for the same degree
of freedom that OS developers have.

This is getting a bit off-topic.  Followups set.

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><div(a,8)-12,mod(a,8)-4,4>,0.1pigment{rgb z}}#local n=n+2;#end#end I("ScUe[]"1
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