Hey all,

Windows Vista SP2 (Biz Edition)

  The "Up Time" and "System Boot Time" statistics appear to impacted
by power management features.  If the system has ever been put into
Standby (S3, suspend-to-RAM) or Hibernate (S4, suspend-to-disk), then
the System Boot Time will be inaccurate, and Up Time may not be what
you expect.

  As near as I can tell, Up Time does not count time the system was in
a suspended state.  So if you boot your computer on Tuesday, then put
it into Standby as soon as you login, then come back a week later and
wake it up, Up Time will only be a few minutes.  While that's arguably
correct, I suspect many would be surprised -- including some of
Microsoft's own programmers.

  System Boot Time does not appear to actually be the date/time the
system was started.  It appears to be the current wall clock time
minus the Up Time counter.  Thus, if the computer has spent any
significant amount of time suspended, System Boot Time will be *very*
inaccurate.  (Hence my suspicion that not everyone at Microsoft would
expect the Up Time counter semantics.)

  "Up Time" is reported in Task Manager, "Performance" tab, "System"
frame.  "System Boot Time" is reported by the "systeminfo"
command-line tool.  The UPTIME.EXE tool from MSKB 232243 also appears
to be effected by this issue; it's various uptime statistics may also
be inconsistent as a result.

  This was observed on Win Vista SP2, running on an Intel motherboard.

  I also tried suspending a Dell OptiPlex 330 running XP Pro SP2 box
for about seven minutes, and checking the results from UPTIME.EXE; it
did *not* appear to have this issue.  "systeminfo" on XP reports the
same Up Time as UPTIME.EXE does, and does not report "System Boot
Time".

  This is mostly cosmetic, but the discrepancy may be significant in
some security scenarios.

-- Ben

~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~
~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/>  ~

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