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General discussion

Computer refuses to wake up

Dec 9, 2004 7:59PM PST

Hi i'm an aspiring techy my mothers PC has a few issues lol. This just started about a month ago though. She leaves it on overnight in sleep mode. When she goes to get on it somtimes it just will not wake up. She ends up having to manually shut down and restart it. It has a 1 GHz P3 processor upgraded from a celeron 766MHz. the 1GHz processor is the max the motherboard will support. It also has 384 MB of sdram. How do I fix this?

Discussion is locked

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Re: Computer refuses to wake up
Dec 9, 2004 8:04PM PST

Dsheet,

Standby issues are notoriously difficult to solve. My Windows 95 Compaq, to name an example, perfectly went in and out of standby until about a month ago. And now it needs alt-f4 reboot, because the desktop doesn't work anymore after it resumes. About the 'only' things I changed are new versions of Spybot and Adaware and replacing AVG 6 by AVG 7.

Tell your mother to shut the machine down in stead of putting it in standby mode, and the problem will be solved quite satisfactory, in my opinion.

Kees

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Re: Computer refuses to wake up
Dec 9, 2004 8:21PM PST

Shutting it down is a good idea! However my mother wouldn't go for it LOL. I forgot to mention that she is running Windows ME. Thank You for your input!

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No fix for that one. Proof inside.
Dec 9, 2004 8:47PM PST
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=296773 writes:

"WORKAROUND
To work around this problem, do not install more than 192 MB of memory in the computer, or quit some programs before attempting to hibernate.

STATUS
Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article."

Just to be clear, I've yet to find Microsoft supply a patch for this one.

"It's dead Jim."

Bob
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Re: No fix for that one. Proof inside.
Dec 9, 2004 9:28PM PST

TY for your replys' I really appreciate having this forum to turn to when I run out of answers. Again Thank You

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Re: Computer refuses to wake up
Dec 9, 2004 8:27PM PST

I'll agree with Kees.

If you really want that power management stuff to work you might end up chasing it around for a long time.

Something to try is visit your mobo makers site and see if your bios and mobo drivers are up to date.

On this machine PM was always iffy, sometimes it would work and sometimes it would not.

I finally got tired of chasing it and turned PM off in windows and in the bios.

When I want to use the machine I turn it on, when I'm finished using the machine I turn it off.

The machine seems happy with that method.

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Computer refuses to wake up
Nov 21, 2005 3:09PM PST

By "sleep mode" I assume you mean Standby? How does your mother "manually shut down"? If neither moving the mouse nor keystrokes will work, you may have to do as I do and press the blicking power button to wake from standby and return to where you left off - without a reboot. The longer you leave the system in standby mode, the more chance you take of a power outage losing your "unsaved" changes. Hibernate mode is safer in that respect.