Very slow after waking up from sleep mode

I'm having a weird problem that just started in the past week or so. On my laptop, I have it set to go into sleep mode when I close the lid. Within the last week or two, when I open it back up, it's ridiculously slow to start running again. I usually get a black screen for 10-15 seconds, and I can see and move the cursor. After that, I usually get the bluish green welcome screen that stays for another 10-15 seconds. My desktop finally pops up after that, but even then everything runs ridiculously slow, to the point it's faster just to unplug the cord and pop out the battery and restart everything. I've run diagnostics, system check, etc., anything I can think of, and still no fix. Anyone else experience this and have any suggestions?

Try shutting the computer completely down (without either hibernating or sleeping), and then starting it back up again.

If the computer sleeps or hibernates, whatever issue there might be will continue to be alive when you wake the computer up. however, if you shut the computer all the way down then restart it, you might end up killing whatever is causing this problem.

If that doesn't fix it, then there may be a service running in the background which is causing the delays and slowness. To test that, you can run MSCONFIG, go to the Services tab, hide all Microsoft services, then disable all services which are showing on the screen (that is, the non-Microsoft services). Then reboot.

If that fixed it, then there is a service which is slowing things down. To find out which one it was, go back into MSCONFIG and re-enable one service at a time, rebooting after each re-enable. Then use the computer a bit, to test it. When things slow down, you will know which service was the culprit. Go back into MSCONFIG and disable that service.

Continue re-enabling services one at a time, to see if there are any more culprits. In this way, you will disable only the culprits, not any needed services.

Thanks for the response. To the first part, I have shutdown and restarted quite a few times over the past week or two, and the problem persists unfortunately. To your second suggestion, I looked into MSCONFIG and there were a few things checked that I unchecked and then restarted. I will let the computer sleep for a bit and see what happens at that point and report back. Also, quick question, is one better than the other: sleep or hibernate?

Both Sleep and Hibernate take a snapshot of your Windows session, then "shut down" the computer. Hibernate writes the snapshot to your hard drive, so it is able to fully power down the computer; however, because hibernate keeps the snapshot on the hard drive, it takes a bit longer to resume where you were than resuming from sleep. Sleep keeps the snapshot in memory, and keeps a little bit of power running, enough to maintain the image in memory. Since the snapshot is in memory, it resumes faster than hibernate. Hybrid sleep puts the snapshot both in memory and on the hard drive, so that if there is a loss of power, it can get the image from the hard drive; whereas if there is no loss of power, it can restore faster (from memory).

You need to be able to completely shut Windows down at times, rather than simply powering down then resuming what you were doing. Therefore, I recommend to people that they set their power options so that holding the power button in does an actual Windows shutdown rather than a sleep or a hibernate.

mrjimphelps said:

If that doesn't fix it, then there may be a service running in the background which is causing the delays and slowness. To test that, you can run MSCONFIG, go to the Services tab, hide all Microsoft services, then disable all services which are showing on the screen (that is, the non-Microsoft services). Then reboot.

If that fixed it, then there is a service which is slowing things down. To find out which one it was, go back into MSCONFIG and re-enable one service at a time, rebooting after each re-enable. Then use the computer a bit, to test it. When things slow down, you will know which service was the culprit. Go back into MSCONFIG and disable that service.

So unfortunately that didn't work, I opened it tonight and went through the same problem, just a black screen with the cursor on it for a few minutes. Any other ideas I could try? I'm willing to try anything at this point (short of reformatting completely).