Here's a tool that supposedly can be used to troubleshoot sleep issues, though I've never used it for that purpose myself:
Power Efficiency Diagnostics Report
more info here:
Evaluate System Energy Usage and Get Power Management Report with PowerCfg -Energy Switch in Windows 7 » My Digital Life
Another way to go about this might be to use msconfig to configure a selective startup, without loading system services and startup items. If it is able to sleep in that mode, then start adding the services and startup items back in until you find the culprit.
Yea, I'm beginning to think it is a software or driver issue, because the screensaver never comes on, regardless of what I change the setting to. The computer sleeps fine, it just never thinks it's idle which stops the screensaver/auto sleep from working.
I think msconfig may be the answer. I'm going to try disabling everything to see if that works, and if so I will have to do like you suggested and re-enable one by one. I have some bad RAM, so my system will be down until I can get the RMA'd RAM back. If it doesn't get figured out tonight, it may be a week or so. I'll post back my findings once I get it sorted out. Thanks for the help!
Turn off the screensaver - it is not needed for flat screens and can interfere. Instead rightclick desktop>Personalize to set up a Desktop Background slideshow with Win7 spectacular scenic pics.
Turn off the Nvidia software in msconfig>Startup and services.msc as it isn't needed if you're not overclocking - just the driver which came with it.
Tried all of the suggestions, and still no dice. I may do a clean install and check to see if the screensaver/sleep works once I get my RAM back after RMA.
What happens if you reduce the time before the PC goes to sleep to very low value, let's say 1 minute? Does it go to sleep then?
Again, turn off the screensaver.
Did you try a Clean Boot Procedure from the troubleshooting list I posted earlier? You have to be thorough with these sleep issues and can't skip steps.
Is everything unchecked in msconfig>Startup besides AV and gadgets/stickynotes if u use them?
Sorry, I missed this post earlier. I have not tried the clean boot procedure yet. I did uncheck everything in msconfig that it would allow me to uncheck. The computer is a domain member, so there were a couple that were required. I also tried using base video to make sure it wasn't something with the video driver causing the problems. No change.
Screensaver is disabled, and sleep is set to 1 minute. I'll give the above procedure a try as soon as I can and post back.
Thanks again for the help!
So I tried the clean boot procedure. I had done something similar before, but I just disabled everything (including microsoft services. I retried the procedure with all services disabled EXCEPT microsoft services like the procedure says. Still no dice. Screensaver is disabled, sleep set to 1 minute, sleep while sharing media enabled. Not sure where to go from here.
My replacement RAM is on it's way, so I'm not sure if that could have anything to do with this. I don't see how it could really, since it seems to be a software issue. I may attempt a re-install if there are not any other ideas to try. I've installed win7 (both x32 & x64) on several computers, and I have yet to run across this problem. Because of the RAM issues I had at first, I had many BSODs and freezes - maybe something was corrupted because of these???
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