Windows 7: Windows freeze after screen shutoff

Hi,



I'm new to the forums and I'm hoping to get some help regarding two specific issues I've been experiencing lately with Windows 7.

1) As I'm on a laptop, my power settings are set to balanced. The system turns off the screen after 10 minutes of inactivity (the default setting). When I touch the pad to turn the screen back on, Windows freezes. I'll have to do ALT CTRL Delete to bring up the log-out menu and sign back in again. After I sign back in, Windows work normally. The only way around this I found is to manually change the power settings to prevent the screen from turning off altogether. Is this a known issue?

2) When I put my system to sleep, I find that it will turn on by itself and then shut itself off again. I think this may be related to automatic update at a given time. It happens at night. The system would just turn on and after 20 seconds or so shut itself down.

Most likely this is a driver problem. Dell support may have some drivers that work better for you.
Drivers & Downloads=

Regarding your second question. This is both a feature and a defect. When you put your computer to sleep, it is suppose to wake up to do any scheduled tasks, updates etc. But several have complained that if the task is time consumming, the puter does not stay awake long enough to finish the task. I have not followed the issue, so there may be a solution.

Regarding your first question, I am guessing that for some reason, you are using excessive memory, when your computer screen turns back on. Go to the event viewer type event viewer in search by start menu) and ck the viewer, it may give you a clue to what is happening.

I thank you both for your help. I think the first issue is driver-related. I will start with disabling everything during start-up and investigate from there. I'm using this laptop for work so I really don't have a lot of programs installed, which should make it a little easier to narrow down the problem. I have checked the event viewer and there's nothing abnormal there beyond the reboot. The second issue I will look up for any known issues with task scheduler. It only happens when the system sleeps.

The problems you have are very common, lots of sleep problems with Windows 7 on many different machines, the vast majority are driver related so hopefully the new drivers will help.

At least there are workarounds until these issues are resolved. I checked Dell's website for the latest drivers and on my end everything is up to date.

I have had the same issue with three significantly different laptops.

#1 - Asus 1000HE (Atom CPU 1.66 GHz, GN40 chipset, Intel GMA 950 graphics)
#2 - Dell XPS 13 (P8600 CPU, Nvidia MCP79 chipset, Nvidia 9400 graphics)
#3 - Acer 1810T (SU7300 CPU, Intel GS45 chipset, Intel 4500HD graphics)

Pretty different machines, but the exact same issue from the first beta build through current fully updated builds. Windows 7 is great, but this really annoys me, and cost me some data before I figured out I had to disable the screen timeout.