Wow... what kind if laptop do you have?
and btw, it kinda makes sense if there were RAM problems, and the graphics driver crashed as a result, since the graphics card usually shares on-board RAM (even if it is a discrete graphics card).
If you're still having problems though, maybe a good clean install will help?
Eh, it is a clean install (only as old as the RC is - I installed it the day it was available). I even completely wiped my hard drive before installing it. And yeah, it's an integrated GPU so it shares system memory, but the fact that the issues
only happen when coming out of standby (and how many things standby tends to screw up) makes me lean more towards a driver issue, since ATI hasn't even released a driver for Windows 7 on this thing yet. The only driver available is the one that came with Win7, and that one sucks serious a**.
I have a fairly new laptop, so if I install XP, I have more system issues than Vista >.<
My laptop is new too - still under warranty with about 4 months left of its 1 year warranty. It came with a Vista sticker but I ordered it specifically with a blank hard drive. XP works near flawlessly on it after I was able to track down all the various drivers for it under XP. It was quite unstable when it didn't have all the drivers installed (and was relying on "standard"-everything drivers).
I will agree with you on the ATI thing though. It's just stupid. The driver is supposed to be for Windows 7, but it doesn't integrate into the power managment tools in Windows, and if I set the card to high performance mode, the card starts overheating and games start to freeze >.<
Oy... my beef with ATI is that they refuse to acknowledge that 7 even exists (or so I've seen). Or if they do, they only do it for the absolute newest hardware that nobody even has yet. They totally ignore backwards compatibility, and worse, they provide Microsoft with broken drivers to ship with the OS.
And now that I read your title, that makes sense. The graphics card power states were messed up on my Mobility Radeon 3650 in Windows 7. Only the "Maximum battery saver" option had a normal name and worked without overheating my card too much >.<
Surprisingly, I haven't had problems with power management in Win7. The different performance modes act in the same way they did for me under XP (going from Max Performance to Max Battery makes the screen "blink" as it switches speed). Brightness control also works much of the time. Now that I've figured out the trick to disable/re-enable the display driver, I now have an almost-always-working brightness/power control. But "almost always working" is a pretty crappy benchmark when it "was working fine" with XP...
Although, if it is the driver problem, then how did removing a stick of RAM help? Less addressing space = fewer crashes?
Nah, I think it's a timing issue related to dual channel operation. The "seemingly common" recommendation to solve a setup-time hang is to remove a stick of memory if you have 4gb RAM (reduce to 2), which takes you into single channel mode. I think by removing a stick of memory, it got out of dual channel mode and that resolved the problem for the moment. It may be the ATI PCIe driver to blame, but I dunno - with all the changes made to the memory subsystem in Win7, I sort of gravitate towards blaming those changes for the hang.
I dunno if I should be eager to see Win7 RTM, or worried... it simply doesn't make sense to keep using XP today, yet MS isn't really offering us much of an alternative! Hopefully these sorts of issues are fixed before RTM. I've pretty much given up on hoping that MS will fix the usability issues with Explorer and the Start menu, but the least they can do is make it stable... =\
