Laptop won't hibernate on mains power

patwa_2

Hi,

For some time now my laptop has a problem whereby it will not go into hibernation when plugged into mains power. The process appears to start fine, but when it gets to the light blue xp screen (just before the black screen with the xp logo) it freezes and the only way to get out of this is to power off manually via the power button. When on batteries the process works fine.

If this were an older machine, I'd be looking at either WiFi or sound driver issues, but as both of these components are active on batteries as well as on power, I have to rule them out. Also, I thought it might be a specific application preventing the hibernate whilst on batteries, due to cpu usage or whatever, but I cannot pinpoint any such application.

Any advice much appreciated. It's an Acer Travelmate, running XP Pro.

Thanks.

H.

wacko911

Try suspending it when you are plugged in, because if it fails and does not freeze you may get an error message which will give a clue.

Only program I ever had problems suspending with is Kerio Personal firewall 2.15

patwa_2

I'll try that and see. Thanks.

wacko911

If it still freezes have you tried looking in the event logs (Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Event viewer). Look for application/System enteries around the time you sent your computer to sleep.

You could also check you have the latest (XP) BIOS for your laptop and if not updating it from the acer website. (JUST MAKES SURE ITS THE RIGHT ONE). Some new laptops have a Vista Bios and an XP bios, so if you bought a Vista laptop and put XP on it, then you may have the wrong bios installed.

aerostar

I am not sure why you all want to hibernate when on mains, hibernation writes to the hard disc a snapshot of the complete memory system, and it does take much longer than standby (my modern laptop with 2gig memory takes 5+ minutes to write the file before it finally closes down.)

In contrast standby is far faster, keeps the system in the memory and switches off all other power consumption, and on restarting will be much quicker than coming out of hibernation.

patwa_2

Hi, the problem has resolved itself. I uninstalled some programs I wasn't using, two of which were VNC and VMWare. I think it was VMWare that may have caused the issue, as it integrates more deeply into Windows than VNC, in particular with regard to networking.

I'll continue to test for a few days but I think that's fixed the issue.

Cheers,

H.