Windows – Machine seems to sleep but doesn’t power off

sleepwindows 7

I have a windows 7 x64 machine which sometimes (not all the time – no discernable pattern) when I tell it to sleep turns off the monitor but never powers off the machine (left it overnight). It then won't wake up, tried the keyboard, mouse and power button.

EDIT:

to be clear the machine turns the screen off like it is going to sleep, but then the fans/disks/cpu do not turn off and the power light on the front of the machine stays on. Once it is in this state it can then be 'woken'

/EDIT

My only option seems to be to hard shut off and reboot.

Why might this be?

Best Answer

The Windows Reliability Monitor can often give you reasons for sleep/hibernation failures in Vista and Windows 7. It showed me in the past that the driver for a piece of USB hardware I had was breaking sleep, once I uninstalled that I had no problems.

Click on the Start button and type reliability and it should show up in the listings, start that and then after it spends a few seconds scanning, it should show you a time-line with significant events including Application Failures, Windows Failures, etc.

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