Weird Sleep/power issues

[paulgj]

Greetings all,

I have a problem that's baffling me. I have a home built Windows 7 desktop about 5-6 years old. Has been working great except for recently, intermittently when going into sleep it will go into a kind of zombie state where the power light is still on and everything else is powered off except for the power supply and other fans in the case. I can't get the system back without pressing the power button again and booting from scratch.


Last night was the most problematic evening of all, this happened multiple times in a row and even hapenned once when selecting shutdown instead of sleep. In one instance the power button began to blink after trying to restart the system.


Finally I was able to get a good shutdown before going to bed.


I replaced the power supply as a test and that didn't help at all.

I also reset the BIOS to optimized defaults and sleep worked ok for a day or two but now seems to be acting up again.

I think RAM may be the next thing to try and test


If anyone has had similar experiences or has any suggestions I would be delighted to hear what you have to say.


Thanks in advance
Paul

[boondocks]

Re: Weird Sleep/power issues

The only thing I can recommend is check all your Windows settings under Power Options, make sure you are using Balanced, then go into Advanced power settings and make sure Hibernation is unchecked.

[profJim]

Re: Weird Sleep/power issues

^^+1
Next time you put your system to sleep, make a note of the time and also note the time you wake up your system. Use the windows Event Viewer to see if there are any warnings or errors reported at the time your system went to sleep and woke up.

Are there any recent hardware changes to your system?
When was the last time you cleaned the dust out of your system?
With your system off and the power supply unplugged from the wall outlet, you can remove and re-seat all of your memory and add-in cards. Check your cpu heatsink and make sure that it is still secure. It might help if you disconnect and reconnect all wires and cables that are connected to your motherboard and make sure that the video cable is secure at both ends. Make sure that all of the motherboard mounting screws are still secure. I perform these procedures every 4 - 6 months for my systems.

You can also try putting your system to sleep when you are running 2 x 2GB of memory instead of your normal 8GB of memory. You might need to try increasing your memory's voltage one click higher.

[parsec]

Re: Weird Sleep/power issues

Given the age of your system, and the fact that a BIOS reset seemed to fix the problem for a short time, the battery on the board may be bad. About $2 for the battery, all mother boards use the same one, CR 2032, which should be easy to find. Don't forget changing the battery will clear the CMOS/BIOS completely, so reset anything you need in the BIOS.

[paulgj]

Re: Weird Sleep/power issues

Thanks everyone for all the suggestions, since my last post I have set the Memory voltages manually to 1.8v and have upped the voltage to the memory controller from 1.2 to 1.3 volts. So far no sleep problems since then. (Touch wood, fingers crossed).