System was shutting down hard drive when sleeping but stopped doing so

I had my sleep mode working just fine, for months. After 10 minutes, the monitor turns off, after 30 minutes the system sleeps, turning off the hard drive and requiring a password to come back up, which it did in an instant after the password was entered.

Then it just quit doing it, with no change of settings!

Now when I move the mouse, the monitor comes back on, but everything is up, it never requires a password and the drive is already running. I can also tell because it used to draw 6 watts on the power meter of the UPS and now draws 65 or so.

Why is this happening?

It sounds like it is never going to sleep. It is simply turning off the monitor.

Manually put it to sleep and then check the power draw and the password on resume.

Start > Power Button menu > Sleep

UsernameIssues said:

It sounds like it is never going to sleep. It is simply turning off the monitor.

Manually put it to sleep and then check the power draw and the password on resume.

Start > Power Button menu > Sleep

Couldn't figure out what you meant, so I went to the Win icon on the lower left of the screen, then to the shut down button, and chose "Sleep" from that. It went black but the power consumption stayed around 65 watts, actually went up some. But I couldn't get it out of that sleep by clicking the mouse button, like I usually do when it goes to sleep by itself. I tried the escape key, nothing would bring it back up. So I had to shut off the power and reboot it that way, but it came up without taking 10 minutes to restart everything, so the state it left off in must have been stored.

It went through the initial bootup in DOS, went to the password, then pretty much came up in a few seconds, without the long reboot process.

Sorry that I was not clear - but it sounds like you did what I was suggesting.

It also sounds like you have a hybrid sleep/hibernation set. In other words, your system goes to sleep and then right into hibernation. You must press the power button (like you did) to get out of hibernation.

These sleep/hibernation settings are handled by your video driver. It would help up to help you if you would complete your system specs:
System Info - See Your System Specs

UsernameIssues said:

Sorry that I was not clear - but it sounds like you did what I was suggesting.

It also sounds like you have a hybrid sleep/hibernation set. In other words, your system goes to sleep and then right into hibernation. You must press the power button (like you did) to get out of hibernation.

These sleep/hibernation settings are handled by your video driver. It would help up to help you if you would complete your system specs:
System Info - See Your System Specs

No, hybernation is for laptops, this has always been set for hybrid sleep, where it stores everything and shuts the HD down. Let me see about the system specs.

But the thing is, this was all working perfectly, then it stopped. Right around the time that our 8 month old HP 8500A printer died and I hauled it out and installed the new Brother MFC-J6910DW.

Stuff changes. It was not supposed to change, but it did. We just have to figure out how to change it back.

There should be a setting that tells the computer how long it should sleep before going into hibernation. How many minutes is that set for?

30, as well as the hard drive shutdown setting. The monitor goes off after 10, the sleep setting is for 30. It's set to never hibernate, but to hybrid sleep.

Think we figured this out by accident. Was having problems with the new Brother MFC-J6910DW driver install. Didn't install right, I installed again, and there were 2 drivers there. I called Brother & talked with support this afternoon, they talked me through uninstalling & reinstalling. After that, the PC started sleeping just fine again, needing a password to come back, and coming back up great. The driver mess must have blocked something. Whew.

Thanks for posting back with that info.