Windows 7: Win7 freezes when coming out of turned off display

We've had two HP dv8t Pavillions for two days. What was an intermittent problem now happens with regularity on BOTH machines: When coming up from a turned off screen, the display comes up fine, but the mouse and all keys freeze. At first I found that if I use the function keys to pull up a browser, after 1-2 minutes the browser came up and the display was no longer frozen. After the first few times I set the Power Options to High Performance so that Sleep is set to Never (since I suspected this might be the problem -- but not true). The machine is still working: Acronis nightly backups are working fine. The display is not responding.

My antivirus is MSE -- I uninstalled Norton as soon as the machines arrived, and followed up with CCleaner to be sure the registry was clean. I upgraded the Home Premium to Ultimate.

I called HP and that support tech said he had heard that hard drives could be bad. I have one 128GB SSD and one 320GB Sata-HD, with an i7-720 chip, in each machine. I ran the HP diagnostics out of the Bios for 1.5 hrs, and all tests were PASSED.



I called Costco tech support, since I bought the machine through them. Now I know some of them wear aluminum hats -- one told me to avoid all SSD since microwave ovens nearby have been known to erase them completely. However, I did want to know if they had any experience with such problems. The fellow I reached this time said that he seen this on several brands of notebooks, and he thinks it is a Windows 7 problem -- so I'm posting this here.

Thanks.

Lester

P.S.

As I see in quite a few postings, this is very common problem. I think I have found a solution, at least for our machines. Our C drives are SSD, so I do not have to worry about them spinning all the time. In any case, even our 10-year old Thinkpads slow down the drives after some period of non-interactive use.

I also saw a posting someone suspected that graphics CPU was stopped if power options were set. Perhaps this occurs when the hard drive is stopped?

In any case, I went to Power Options and created my own Custom Plan, using the High Performance Plan as a template. Under Change advanced power settings -> Hard disk -> Turn off hard drive after -> Plugged in, I set the time to Never .

So far, the display has not frozen after long idle periods. As always, "past performance is not an accurate indicator of future performance"!

Lester

Well, the past is not the future: The problem has come back. I am now putting in Never for all plugin options. It will be interesting to see what happens, to see if I will keep this machine.