Laptop screen goes black, requiring hard reset

Hello, I was hoping maybe somebody could help me with this laptop. The issue I'm having is most of the time when I walk away from it and leave it on, upon returning the screen is just black, the computer is running but there is no response on the keyboard or mouse, which requires a hard shutdown and a restart. It then says it was not shut down properly, I start it up, and it runs fine until the next time I walk away and it does this freeze thing. I also want to note that it does not always do this, sometimes it sleeps like it should, but the problem is increasing in frequency.

No I have had this before its the drivers, the video card is going out, anything? Nobody on this forum has seen a laptop that would keep running but freeze on a black screen after going idle?

Take a guess!

Sounds like maybe its hung before totally achieving sleep mode. Then the mouse and keyboard might be inactive until it fully achieves the sleep state so as not to corrupt things.

Maybe run
PowerCFG -Energy
which maybe will give you a hint to something in conflict.

have you tried stopping it from going to sleep, just to see if it makes any difference?

I had this happen to me 2 yrs ago. After much trial and error (and many hard resets), I figured out to set the display to "Never" turn off and to put the computer to sleep after 1hr. This is both plugged in and on battery. Dont know why it does that, but this combo has worked for me.

Hmm I was going to log back on to thank you STC but apparently the computer freezes even when the display monitor is on. So it freezes on the screen showing whatever I was doing instead. Any more thoughts?

What about your temperatures, are they normal? CPU usage?

CPU useage seems to be normal when it's running fine, as to whether or not something happens when it's idling that makes it freeze, I don't know.

I have a suspicion that the freeze issue may be heat related because the computer is warm and I've never owned a laptop before, but I know others who have and it seems like theirs are even warmer sometimes. Thinking about opening it up and seeing if there is dust in there or something. The computer is only about a year old, I know I can't rule out a hardware issue but I wish I could.

And obviously it could be the OS... but on a factory made computer that's only a year old?