Windows 7 Windows 7 Won't Wake Up!

blade2718

New Member
Joined
May 31, 2009
I just installed Windows 7 (64 bit) on a fresh system last night. Installation was fine, did a little web browsing, then put the machine to sleep. This morning, I go to the computer, click the mouse, and...nothing. Press a bunch of keys, nothing. Cutting power to the machine causes it to power up, power down, then power back up. And I have no idea what's going on.

I'd love to change settings, but I can't get any output from my machine!
 
Sorry for not understanding completely. Are you saying your system is no longer booting up, or just that when it goes to sleep you need to use the power button to shut down and bring it back up?

My machine has never (even with xp) come out of sleep/hibernate so I just disable that option and have the monitor shut off after 45 minutes and the HDD shut off after 1 hour.
 
Sorry for not understanding completely. Are you saying your system is no longer booting up, or just that when it goes to sleep you need to use the power button to shut down and bring it back up?
There is HDD activity, but the screen is dead; no power to the monitor or keyboard (does not react to Num Lock or Caps Lock).
 
I too just installed win7 and I have disabled the sleep/hibernate because of this issue. When it goes in sleep I come back and press a button on the keyboard. The fans and HDD start spinning but the keyboard, mouse and monitor remain inactive. Only fix i can find is a hard reboot.

I saw some people mention graphics card driver might be outdated, but I'm certain i have the newest for my geforce 260. Any fixes for this problem would be greatly appreciated.
 
Go to Control panel > Power Option, choose Change when the computer sleeps, then click the change Advanced power settings and there are many options you can choose from, such as :

Hard drive
Desktop Background settins
wireless Adapter settings

This may be the one to look at closely, it;s the Sleep entry.
 
i believe this is a sleep problem. In the advanced power options settings I have turned off the hybernate option and yet I've still had this happen. Maybe the opposite settings would work...like say hybernate after 15 min and sleep on never....may be worth a try. You can get there by Control panel>Power options>change when computer sleeps>change advanced power settings> Sleep
 
PC hangs after monitor goes to sleep, won't reboot

Windows 7 powers down monitor, pc becomes locked and unbootable! My pc did a similar thing after the initial load. I walked away. Came back, everything was off, and my blue power led was flashing on the pc. Keyboard would not wake up, monitor would not come on. Pressed power button on pc, no post beeps, no monitor, nada! Would no longer boot by pressing power button. I strafed every key on the keyboard, no response. Then I hit the reset button after hitting the power button again , it reset, posted, and booted into windows. I shut off the power down monitor setting and set sleep to never until I can figure out why putting the monitor to sleep locks up the pc. I suspect it has something to do with my 326mb video card, or the monitor itself. If I find out more with experimentation, I will post it out here. But it looks like Windows 7 may have some power management issues. I will post pc config shortly, as I am not home right now to validate motherboard, memory, etc. It is an asus m/board and good video card/memory, etc. Not a cheesy pc at all.
 
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My problem (happens every once in a while) is after the monitor goes off after 20 minutes and I come back and move the mouse to bring back the desktop; the mouse moves freely, but the keyboard and desktop are frozen. After a short period of time it is operating again and back to normal (20 seconds to several minutes). I have tried stopping every program and even have the hard drive never shut down to no avail. I thought it was ATI CCC, but it turned out not to be.
 
I have the exact same problem here. Mine is thus:
If I go away from the computer for a short while (say 10 min) sometimes when I come back the monitor will be light blue screen and non functional. I cannot wake the computer without rebooting it. It always reboots fine and says that Windows did not shutdown properly and would i like to start in safemode. I always say no and then Windows 7 boots fine. I have had this happen 3x over the last 3 weeks so it isn't really annoying yet, but this is a brand new system (3weeks old ) with Windows 7 Ultimate 7 64bit and I have the latest of all drivers so I cannot imagine what could be the problem.
High quality power supply, mother board, all components and it never messes up when I am using the computer just when I am not using it.
To add I keep this computer on 24/7 and wake it from sleep successfully every other time without incident.
 
I seem to find a workaround over it, but just testing it through a 1 minute sleep, i'll move on to 5 10 and 20 to check if its really the case

The buggy issues came from two words... HYBRID SLEEP

you can see the where from :
- Control Panel > Hardware and Sound >Power Options > Edit Plan Settings
- Open the "Sleep" tree > Open the "Allow Hybrid Sleep" tree and choose "OFF"

So far after turning this one off i've had succesful return with no hangs (both display off and sleep off with 1 and 2 minutes respectively), i will increase the time to see if the issue is time related or indeed because of this... Hybrid Sleep option thingie...
 
Work around - sometimes

When I try to wake up from hibernation, my screen doesn't always wake up. However, I have found a work around for it. Type my password to login (on the black screen), then ctrl-alt-del, which wakes up the monitor and gets me going. Hope that helps, and hopefully someone figures out the root cause!
 
Hi, I get this problem on a new PC which is a vanilla flavoured build of a Windows 7 disk, so the machine should have all the settings that Microsoft recommend. The problem occurs about 2 to 5% of the time. Most times the machine wakes up obligingly when I click the left mouse button (on all the previous Windows systems I have used, pressing a keyboard key would also waking up, but this feature seems to have gone on Windows 7). I have looked at the control panel settings and the monitor goes off after 10 minutes and the computer goes to sleep after 30. Looking at the sleep settings under advanced, hybrid sleeping is on and hibernate is set to never. So those are my settings. When I get the problem, on clicking the mouse left button, the fans come on in the box but the screen stays entirely dark. The monitor is an Acer 3243H and its little activity light remains in the Amber setting and does not move onto the blue setting that indicates the screen is active. The only way to recover from the state is to press the power button and after about 10 seconds the machine closes down. Upon powering up the machine displays a little spiral flag of Windows 7 but the monitor remains blank. Sometimes I see the mouse cursor, white upon a black background. Sometimes after waiting a couple of minutes to monitor displays "resuming Windows 7", but sometimes it doesn't. In this state of affairs after power machine off again and on, whereupon it again says "resuming Windows 7" and it goes on with the display active so that the machine can be used normally. Had the machine gone into hibernate, although it is said never to? I also can't help but wonder whether the machine is not waking up the display adapter properly. On my machine I have an NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT display adapter. Basically I am extremely pleased with Windows 7 as an operating system, but this fault, which typically takes about quarter of an hour to work through eachtime it happens, I find extremely annoying. I like the idea of hybrid sleep as explained in the Microsoft documentation, and I don't like to have my machine using more power than it absolutely has to, but I am about to remove the hybrid sleep setting in order to see if it removes this problem. I should add that I do not like fiddling around with machine settings in circumstanceswhen basically I have little idea of whether or not they will cure a problem, and whenever I am obliged to do this I feel that I am botching in order to try to correct somebody else's problem.
I hope we can receive some concrete advice about this.
 
I got this problem resolved.

My laptop is thinkpad T400 with windows 7. My setting is to activate the blank screen saver after an ilde period, but never let my laptop go into sleep mode. Then after a while, the screen will goto blank, but won't display the login screen anymore, though I hit keyboard and move mouse. But my laptop still has some reponse for the keyboard action.

Go to BIOS setup, change "switchable graphic card" to "discrete graphic card". This problem will disappear.

Hope this information could give you some help!
 
I have the problem on my desktop, win7 32 bit - kernal power event 41 problem - will hmaple's solution fix it? It seems this problem is pretty prevalent, but
I have yet to see any consensus on a fix. Don't understand why not, since a lot of people have the problem and it is darned annoying. Has anyone figured it out yet and I missed it?
 
My computer would not wake from sleep mode. It would wake from hibernation however. My system is a Dell E6500 P9600 with Win 7 Pro 64 with Nvidia Quadro NV160M graphics.

I found the following fix. My Nvidia driver is the culprit. All I did was reinstall the driver and all was well again. Computer wakes from sleep in about 2 seconds. Every time I install new drivers for other hardware (eg logitech mice) something gets messed up in the Nvidia drivers. I reinstall the Nvidia drivers and the problem goes away. Hope this helps others suffering from this very annoying problem.

Also, I followed the advice of others on this thread, so my hybrid sleep is set to off and wake timers are disabled.
 
I just "upgraded" from Vista Home Premium. I am running a Nvidia Video Card (with Windows 7 latest driver). Anyway, I have tried every setting there is in Power settings, and computer still randomly will not wake up from sleep. I've turned off the hybernate, hybrid sleep; etc.etc.

It sleeps fine for a day or so, then wham, won't wake up. Hard Drive light doesn't come on and it just sits there...hard reboot (not good for hd) is only way to get it going again.

Why can't microsoft EVER get it right. They sold Windows 7, to me anyway, on the quick boot and quick wake up on sleep issue, then put out a product that is so buggy that computers wont' wake up.

Bring on the I-pad!!!!!
 
Suspicious of HD and video card

I've been having this problem too.

Interestingly, I am currently awaiting delivery of my replacement hard drive - Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB - because after this issue started (1 week after buying new computer), I ran diagnostic on bootup and got a BIOHD-8 error.

I mention this because this particular hard drive is advertised to optimize spin speed, seek speeds, etc, etc. I know that my particular hard drive has a problem; not suggesting that everyone's does, but on the other hand you might want to run diagnostic. Couldn't hurt. Adding it up (hard drive special features + sleep issue + my HD has an error) made me curious whether the underlying issue is that my hard drive itself is not properly waking up - perhaps spinning but not reading.

Secondly, I've seen a couple people mention their video cards. I got a GeForce GT 220 (1gb) PCIE card (low rated, but I got it at a bargain basement price), and this (and a couple other) problems SEEMED to start when I installed it 2-3 days after getting the computer. However, the 2-day gap between receiving the computer and installing the video card probably wasn't enough time to really prove anything. Win7 "automatically" updated my driver after I installed the video card, but after I had several crashes, I looked manually and - what a shock - it hadn't updated to the most recent version. Manually updating that driver solved all the problems EXCEPT this "won't wake up" problem.

Originally, I actually was convinced the problem was simply the video card not responding after sleeping, but immediately after I decided to remove the video card and see if that fixed the problem, I ran the system diagnostic. Then, of course, I got the hard drive error, which complicates things.

So I'm about to turn off hybrid sleep and see if that does anything.
If NOT, I'll remove my video card and use onboard video.
If that doesn't work, I'll have to see what happens with the new HD.
I'll try and remember to report back afterward. In the meantime, it might be interesting to find out what video cards everyone is using, and what version of your video driver you have.

Oh yes - when I googled my computer model number plus "won't wake from sleep", I got an HP help page that had a bazillion instructions that were irrelevant, but they did mention enabling your keyboard/mouse to wake the computer from sleep. It's worth checking, anyway.

(From there, the wheels in my brain got turning and I just uploaded the Win7 driver for my particular mouse/keyboard set. I'm sure it can't hurt.)
 
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I seem to find a workaround over it, but just testing it through a 1 minute sleep, i'll move on to 5 10 and 20 to check if its really the case

The buggy issues came from two words... HYBRID SLEEP

you can see the where from :
- Control Panel > Hardware and Sound >Power Options > Edit Plan Settings
- Open the "Sleep" tree > Open the "Allow Hybrid Sleep" tree and choose "OFF"

So far after turning this one off i've had succesful return with no hangs (both display off and sleep off with 1 and 2 minutes respectively), i will increase the time to see if the issue is time related or indeed because of this... Hybrid Sleep option thingie...

I can hereby confirm, turning off the `Hybrid sleep´ option has resolved my problem.

My system would go into sleep after 30 minutes by Win7 default. When waking it up with a touch of the power button the fans and HD would become active, but my screen would not light and the system would not respond in any way. A hard reset was needed to bring it back.

As said, turning off the `Hybrid sleep´ option had resolved this issue for manual sleep as well as automated sleep due to inactivity.

Good luck.
 
I've been having a similar issue as most of you, and one person on this thread said they had the same thing. Whenever I would try to wake my notebook up from sleep, it rebooted and gave me an error that windows didn't shut down properly.

I've been working on this on and off ever since 7 came out!!! Mostly, I just dealt with it, but i've been up all night and I finally got it (I think). Now, I first thought it was a driver issue. After all, I remembered a time (when I got it) that it worked, but I started having this issue back with vista even. I got the most current drivers for everything (about 5 hours in google), all more current than is on HP's website... btw I have a pavilion notebook, dv2610us.

I went back to HP's site to get the OLD drivers to try those [LOL] and I realized that my BIOS is 14 versions out of date! Dunno how that happened, since the most current one is from late in 2008, but I guess it's because I long since gave up going to HP's site for "new" updates.

Anyhow, it works now!! And it works great, three seconds to wake up (one of many ways win 7 really shines). So update your BIOSes! Interestingly, my wifi signal is almost double after the update as well. When you've done that, find the most current drivers for your heavy hitters (chipset, VGA, WLAN...). I don't mean go to your comp's manufacturer's support page; I mean download CPU-Z and google the actual hardware codes of your stuff. I didn't have to mess around with that hybrid sleep stuff, but my problem is not quite the same as many of yours.

Hope this saves someone a headache!!
 
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