Wow !  The mysterious and annoying RDC problem on my laptop took a dangerous turn yesterday.  The problem has to do with the power setting properties sometimes mutating, when I bring my Windows XP Media Center laptop out of hibernation, and connect to it via RDC.  The original problem is described in this post.

Apple released the new 3.1 O/S for the iPhone.  Having a very busy week, I decided to start downloading the software and the firmware installation after I was setup at work.  I was not going to stay up for the buzz of the new Apple release.  So I setup everything in the morning, and I was able to launch the whole process via RDC on the laptop, switch back to my “work”-station, and be productive while the upgrade process ran automagically.

After 15-minutes, I got up to take a break and, while on it, had this sudden feeling of dread come over me.  I had not verified that the standby and hibernation timeouts were still set to “never” after I connected via RDC.  So I hurried back to my desk and checked.

Sure enough, the settings had mutated to 20 minute standby, and 30 minute hibernation for external power.  D*!@mn 1t  !!  As I discovered this, the iPhone was displaying the Apple logo, with a progress bar under it just starting to fill.  I obviously came back in time.  Had the laptop gone into standby and hibernation, it would have screwed the firmware load, and I would have been on the phone with Apple support (at a minimum) to get this fixed.

I still have seen no information on this problem with mutating standby and hibernation settings, and I got a very ugly taste of what damage it can potentially do.  Microsoft… find this and fix this !!!

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