Windows – What could be causing windows to fail to sleep or hibernate, and revert system settings

hibernatepower-managementsleepwindows 8

I am running Windows 8.1 on my system (Dell e6520) and the symptoms are this:

  1. My PC won't sleep or hibernate. It the screen turns off, but the fans just run and run, and after a little while, it completely shuts down, and when I start it back up, everything is closed, like it was a fresh boot/restart.
  2. I'm have a weird issue with outlook described here and the fix works fine – modifying a registry value. The weirder part is that after my computer fails to sleep or hibernate, and it starts back up, the registry value is GONE, like I never modified it, and thus the outlook error message is back.
  3. I thought maybe a graphics driver was preventing the sleep/hibernate, so I attempted to uninstall the NVIDIA graphics driver and control panel. HOWEVER, once the computer fails to sleep/hibernate, the NVIDIA graphics driver and control panel appear BACK on my system, like I didn't uninstall them.

What could be happening here? I really need to be able to sleep/hibernate so I don't lose work or my work state, and these issues are really concerning.

What I've tried, without success:

  1. Uninstalling graphics driver mentioned above
  2. Disabling hibernate and using sleep
  3. disabling/re-enabling hibernate
  4. Disabling startup items
  5. Sleeping as local system admin account
  6. disconnecting all USB, network, and bluetooth devices

Best Answer

I have also fixed my issue, It turns out after trying just about everything it is related to network devices. After right clicking all of my network devices and choosing Disable i was once again able to perform a standby. Then through a process of disabling different combinations of my available network devices I was able to pinpoint which device had the issue. A quick uninstall and re-install of that device driver fixed the issue.

I would recommend trying the virtual/exotic network devices first as they are more likely to be contributing to the issue.

Related Question