Windows 7 Crashes on Sleep.

owtte

New Member
Hullo there.

Wonder if you can help me: I have a nice little self-build, courtesy of a couple of my gaming friends, that's been running happily and working like a charm since early Februaryish kind of time. In fact, I couldn't fault it at all, until I had to move my computer between homes. Once I got it into its new home, I started experiencing this issue: the computer would crash whenever the computer went to sleep. I can't say I actually witnessed the crash itself. I just noticed, on returning, that the computer was off, instead of sleeping. On turning it on, I get the typical "Windows has recovered from an unexpected shutdown" message, but it says it doesn't know why. It then started refusing to shut down or restart properly, at which point I started to panic and look into potential issues.

I figured that it might be hardware related since it only started after I'd moved it, but I had a peek inside and nothing *seems* to be out of place. Then I thought, maybe software. I checked the updates and there were a few updates around the time I brought it home. I restored to a version of the system I had prior to coming home, and the problem went away for a while. Then, I was planning on doing the updates one by one and checking to see if it was any of those, but I basically forgot to disable automatic updating, and it updated everything again.
It's started crashing again. Whilst I'd love to keep restoring back to March 12th, this is causing a few issues in that I have to keep reinstalling stuff and changing my clock settings.

Before my first restore, I ran the debugger and it didn't want to work. It got upset with my symbols package. But it said it was "probably due to ntoskrnl.exe".
I've also run memtest86 for 7 passes, no issues there.
I updated my BIOS to the latest version at the suggestion of a similar problem I saw online, to no avail.

I'm sort of at my wit's end, here. I'll admit, I'm something of a noob. I'd be really grateful for any help you might be able to offer me.

Unfortunately, because of my foolishness, I didn't copy the minidumps from before the restores. I've zipped the ones that I have got now, though.
 

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Have you checked Windows Update to see if it is giving you a hardware driver update?

Power issues can sometimes be diagnosed by running the Powercfg utility. It is supposed to diagnose the system and alert you to sleep issues. Before you run it, shutdown all non-essential programs. After it is finished, copy the .html file to the desktop to read. You will probably get warnings about USB stuff, but they normally do not mean much. Look for something else.

Open an administrative command prompt (Winkey and type cmd, then CTRL+Shift+Enter) and type:

Powercfg -energy
 
Have you checked Windows Update to see if it is giving you a hardware driver update?
My drivers were the first thing I checked - they're all up-to-date. At one point I thought it might be a new driver upsetting the system somehow, so I rolled it back. That did nothing, so it's been re-updated.

Power issues can sometimes be diagnosed by running the Powercfg utility. It is supposed to diagnose the system and alert you to sleep issues. Before you run it, shutdown all non-essential programs. After it is finished, copy the .html file to the desktop to read. You will probably get warnings about USB stuff, but they normally do not mean much. Look for something else.
Other than the USB stuff, I get 2 errors:

Platform Power Management Capabilities:pCI Express Active-State Power Management (ASPM) Disabled
PCI Express Active-State Power Management (ASPM) has been disabled due to a known incompatibility with the hardware in this computer.

Power Policy:Sleep timeout is disabled (Plugged In)
The computer is not configured to automatically sleep after a period of inactivity.


The latter is my own doing; I didn't want it to keep crashing so I set automatic sleep to never. Not really sure what the former's referring to, though...

EDIT: I might add at this point that the external devices I've got plugged in here are all different to the stuff I had been using prior to this point. I'm only staying here for a bit, and I return to my original residence in less than a week, now. Could it be that some of this old stuff I've got plugged in just isn't agreeing with my computer, or anything like that?
 
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ASPM says the same thing on my system, and I have no problem going to sleep.

Which sleep states are allowed on your system, and does it look like you are using one of those? On mine, (S1-S4) only S2 is not supported.

You could unplug all your external devices for testing. Maybe try changing power plans also for testing.

I had hoped the report would have pointed at some device or application not allowing for sleep.
 
Same; all other than S2 are supported.

As a matter of interest, as I was unplugging stuff from my front USB ports to test as you suggested, my hand grazed the power button (an unfortunate design feature of my case, evidently, is the placement of the USB ports millimetres away from the power) and initiated a shutdown. My computer didn't shut down properly last night, so it's playing up again, but just now it shut down as per normal. So I've now noted that if it's just been started up (the only program I've run is Chrome), it sleeps and shuts down just fine.
 
Sounds like you might be ready to do some selective troubleshooting. Maybe you can find something starting up or some other situation that seems to bring on the problem.

Rebooting the system may have cleaned out something that was hanging, only time will tell for sure.

Someone should come by soon to read your Dump file....
 
Hmm. I've been giving it a go. I just ran everything that I've been running for the past couple of weeks (same programs: adobe reader, ms word, excel, itunes, skype, chrome). It went to sleep this time, but I'm not entirely convinced the problem has resolved itself. I guess we'll find out when I send it to sleep tonight...
But yeah, thanks for all your suggestions and stuff so far :)
 
I just made my feeble attempt at running your dump file.

It seems to indicate a USB Hub problem. Which normally means some device connected might be responsible. One file indicates "bcmwlhigh664.sys" which might be related to a Broadcom device, but not sure.

If you feel like it, you might use the Snipping Tool to take a picture of your Error (red) entries in the energy report and attach using the paperclip on the Advanced Reply page. Maybe something might show up that is not normal.
 
Other than the two I quoted before, these're the remaining ones (the USB-related stuff).
 

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I suppose the only other thing I might mention, is when I was looking for the Broadcom driver, Netgear was mentioned. If it is related to the USB Network Adapter, maybe you could check the Device Manager and look at its properties and power management tab and see what is selected.

If it is allowing the system to shut it down, try unchecking the box or if it is not already checked, check it.
 
Right, that was checked, so I just unchecked that. Computer successfully went to sleep after having been awake for several hours, which is fairly promising. On another note, that seems to have improved my wireless, somewhat, apparently. So even if that *wasn't* the issue, quite glad you pointed that one out :)
 
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update - left my computer running but unused for a couple of hours. When I came back, the wireless had gone odd, so I unplugged it, and it wasn't responding when I plugged it back in. Then the computer didn't want to restart (sat on the "shutting down" screen for ages).
Looks like we've still got a bit of an issue. :(

EDIT: it went to sleep at one point fine, but last night it didn't sleep for some reason or other. I'm starting to think it's application-based, now, but I'm not really sure how to go about pinpointing the problem.
 
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Hey guys, just to bump this a little; I'd be grateful for any help as I'm still having issues. Should you want me to attach the latest dumps, let me know and I'll do so.
 
sorry for like the triple post...

just wanted to say for anyone who's had the same problem, it looks like mine was a hardware thing. Something old that I'd connected as an external device. It just didn't agree with my computer, and bad stuff happened. My computer is back where it should be, now, and has all the original stuff connected to it. It's running fine.

Thanks Saltgrass, for the help and patience.
 
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