PC Intermittently Freezes when invoking Sleep Mode

Hi all,

I'm experiencing an infrequently intermittent problem when I select "Sleep" from the Windows Shutdown Menu. My PC will occasionally freeze up but that happens after my Video Card apparently receives the usual signal from the Sleep command since the Monitor will shut off as normal.

After that happens, I watch my HDD drive LED and, when the problem occurs, it will stop all activity and the PC freezes, ie, no response from the keyboard or mouse. The monitor display stays off.

After I restart the PC, everything is ok.

My PC info in in my "System Spec" part of my signature. Some additional info with my PC (Desktop PC, custom built)

I have "hybrid sleep" disabled in Powercfg since I prefer the "S3" (save to RAM mode with no HDD environment saved). ie,

C:\Windows\system32> powerfcg -h off

This problem has only occurred 3 times during the past couple of months so what I'm more curious about is,

Is there a CMD line or utility that can check the DLL that invokes the Sleep commands to possibly check for a corruption within that shell?

Or in another way, is there a tool to determine the cause of the intermittent issue. ie, to eliminate hardware possibilities such as my Nvidia card, etc?

I looked at my Windows Event Viewer log but as a novice, I'm not sure what section to view within the Event Log.

I did look at the "System" event section but I only see the usual events after an unexpected shutdown "The previous shutdown was unexpected."

The last item listed in the Event Viewer prior to the unexpected shutdown was an "Event 7036" informational message "The Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) service entered the paused state."

Attached is a screencap of the last event logged ("Details" tab) before the PC froze up when invoking the Standby command:

If the steps in that tutorial don't help, then go over your install thoroughly using these Troubleshooting Steps for Windows 7.

Keep in mind Sleep issues are most always Display driver or card issues. So try all available drivers to check the difference, reinstall card if necessary.

To test timeout I set Sleep to 1 minute and Hibernate to 2 minutes until it works correctly. The optimal settings for this which please most users is 30 minutes and 60 minutes. This allows one to walk away from the PC without any concern about coming back.

↑ Andrew, for the link. It's bookmarked and when I have more time to study the info, I'll check back here and let you all know what happens.

gregrocker said:

If the steps in that tutorial don't help, then go over your install thoroughly using these Troubleshooting Steps for Windows 7.

Keep in mind Sleep issues are most always Display driver or card issues. So try all available drivers to check the difference, reinstall card if necessary.

To test timeout I set Sleep to 1 minute and Hibernate to 2 minutes until it works correctly. The optimal settings for this which please most users is 30 minutes and 60 minutes. This allows one to walk away from the PC without any concern about coming back.

Greg, . The Win 7 Troubleshooting link is bookmarked.

That's interesting about the Display / card info as I've thought about that over the past few weeks since I've seen this intermittent issue.

I forgot to mention in my original post:

I use the Sleep mode, I'm guessing, in a less-popular way than the majority of Win users do. I invoke the Sleep mode manually, ie, with the Win Shutdown Menu, usually from Desktop-active.

The reason that I do this is that my Desktop & Laptop PC's don't always go into Sleep via the timeout method so I adjusted my Control Panel "sleep timeout" value to ~5 hours since I basically don't use that method to put the PC to sleep.

The reason for that is that the "power requests" query in Powercfg will occasionally reveal an external device, ie, USB, or a Homegroup network signal/request (my guess being my Laptop which is networked with my Desktop PC) that will often prevent my PC's from going to sleep via the timeout method.

At the time I was reading about this topic, I tried to use the Powercfg "override" in CMD and that worked for a while but the effects aren't retained after a restart, etc.

After reading about the various items that can prevent a PC from going to sleep with the timeout method, I decided to use the Sleep command (via the Win Shutdown Menu) in a way that's somewhat similar to locking the workstation with <win> L .

I always close apps, files, etc, and all windows before putting the PC to sleep since I'm not using Hybrid mode.

I've only seen 3 occurrences of the Sleep/freezing issue since I've been running Win 7 (3 years). I invoke the Sleep mode about 3-4 times daily and with one daily script that launches with Task Scheduler (an "Autohotkey" script) so the failure rate of this issue is very small.

The Sleep mode is my preferred method to leave the PC unattended since I run overnight unattended AV & Malware scans so I can't shut down the PC's overnight and run unattended tasks.

I use the Task Scheduler to wake the PC's a couple of minutes before the scans begin.

That's been working reliably since my Win 7 install's on both PC's, due to I'm sure what has proven to me to be the best OS that I've loaded on my PC's

Once power issues are resolved the timeouts should be working correctly as this feature is perfected in Win7.

I know of no installs to date where these couldn't' be resolved satisfactorily, with timeouts working correctly.

Let us know how the steps work, as there are more including a trace that will determine with certainty the cause, by Gathering a Startup, Shutdown, Sleep, Hibernate, or Reboot Trace - Windows 7 Forums

gregrocker said:

Once power issues are resolved the timeouts should be working correctly as this feature is perfected in Win7.

I know of no installs to date where these couldn't' be resolved satisfactorily, with timeouts working correctly.

Let us know how the steps work, as there are more including a trace that will determine with certainty the cause, by Gathering a Startup, Shutdown, Sleep, Hibernate, or Reboot Trace - Windows 7 Forums

Greg, Thanks again :) Wow, that link is cool, tracing tool :) I'll look at that one asap.

If I can resolve the intermittent PC freezing issue when calling Sleep, I'll be a happy camper as I actually prefer to put my PC's to sleep manually vs the timeout method.

I'll look into that issue as well (power requests / preventing the sleep timeout).

OT: Another option that's great about Win 7 (I think this was added with Vista) relating to the Sleep topic is this Registry value that became available for users:

Sleep Return Timeout for Unattended Wake Up

That allows a lot of flexibility with 7 to run unattended tasks

I like Sleep>Hibernate timeouts so I can walk away from one of my PC's without having to think twice about if I shut down or saved work - whether I come back in 5 minutes or 5 days.

gregrocker said:

I like Sleep>Hibernate timeouts so I can walk away from one of my PC's without having to think twice about if I shut down or saved work - whether I come back in 5 minutes or 5 days.

Believe me, I'm probably on a deserted island with the way I put my PC's to sleep . I have an un-related to topic reason though so that's why I do it manually. Actually, I just press <win> s since I have that hotkey'ed to call the Sleep dll via a script tool ("Autohotkey").

I'm not a "mouse" guy (I don't use a mouse much on my Desktop PC)