Laptop crashes when waking up from sleep

Hi. I've seen a lot of other threads from people with this same problem, but the solution to it seems very dependent on a lot of very specific things about your own situation, so here I am

Whenever my laptop goes into sleep mode, it acts as it normally would while in sleep mode, but when I attempt to wake it up, the hard drive kicks back into action, but the screen doesn't turn on and I can't do anything. Also, caps lock becomes stuck on, I press the key and the LED doesn't turn off, even if it wasn't on before the crash. So I can't do anything but press the power button and reboot it, and then I get the usual message about how Windows didn't shut down correctly, so I just choose start windows normally, and it doesn't resume, it restarts from scratch.

Any help would be massively appreciated because I honestly don't know what could be causing this, and right now, I've got my laptop set to never sleep, which is obviously a fix, but I'd rather be able to have it in sleep mode if I want to save battery power or want some peace and quiet, without having to shut it down.

I'm assuming you use hibernation sleep not standby sleep. Laptops have two sleep options - hibernate and standby. I think yours defaults to hibernation. This means when it goes to sleep, it takes everything in ram and copies it as a big file image to the hard drive, then shuts off completely, drawing no further power from your battery until you awaken. But the task of re-loading that file image back into ram upon awakening is frought with timing challenges and can lead to errors on some laptops, such as you are having. If you are still within warranty Toshiba should fix this, just tell them "machine won't awaken from hibernation". Also you can google that phrase and get a list of troubleshooting steps. Its a common problem and you may or may not be able to fix it.

The second sleep option is standby, where when you go to sleep what is in ram stays in ram, making it much easier and quicker for the machine to awaken, however it does draw a small amount of power from the battery while it is asleep. I would try disabling hibernation and seeing if the impact on your battery is minimal enough that you can live with it. You can play around with settings within control panel > power > advanced, or just use this command:

start > run > powercfg.exe /hibernate off
to disable

start > run > powercfg.exe /hibernate on
to re-enable

Hi. Thanks for the information, but partially for this reason, and for another reason, I decided that it would be best to reinstall Windows 7, and after I reinstalled it and installed various drivers, the problem was gone! But then I installed an update for my video controller driver, and the problem came back, so I did a system restore to before I installed that video driver update, and it was gone again, so it was a video controller driver that was causing the problem