Sleep mode. Should I remove it?

mickledore

mickledore

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I'm on Windows 7 on this Chillblast PC machine that is nearly 3 years old.
For most of it's life it has been erratic with sleep mode. It has spells when it will not go to sleep, it just wakes itself up almost immediately, then I have to put it to sleep again. Eventually it takes. This is a random problem. Sometimes it will go for days/weeks with no problems, then it will do it every time for a short period. I've learned to live with it.
Now I'm having problems waking up from sleep. It has an increasing tendency to do a forced shut down when I try to wake it up. This happens if I use the mouse, keyboard or the on/off switch. Again it is not every time, but is becoming more and more prevalent. I have changed mouse and keyboard to no avail. it does take a while to respond to the on/off key to start up again; presumably it is thinking for itself.

When it refused to go to sleep I contacted Chillblast who tell me that there are known problems with sleep mode. I've just contacted them again (before the warranty expires!) and their suggestion is to disable sleep mode. This will obviously solve that problem but what problems will it create? I use sleep a lot leaving my machine for varying times from 5 minutes to an hour or so. Would no sleep mode mean the machine stayed on churning away and eating power? I know I could switch off and on again but that too is time consuming. I could use hibernate assuming that there will be no problems there, or are the same problems with that mode?

The machine runs perfectly normally other than this annoying problem. Anyone have any ideas what might be best?
 
Is this sleep or hibernate? I don't use sleep, but I set my laptop to hibernate when I close the lid. TBH because it runs from SSD it's slightly slower to recover than it is from a cold boot.

So yes, remove sleep mode.
 
It's sleep.
I'm told that PC machines don't have hibernate as standard - only laptops have that. But Chillblast did show me how to set it up although I don't tend to use it because it is slow to wake up and I'm worried that it too might refuse to wake up and from a much deeper sleep that might be difficult fir a non techy like me to circumvent.
 
So it's a desktop? I wouldn't let it sleep at all, but in power management I would allow the monitor to power off after 15min and the HDD (if fitted) to spin down after an hour.
 
im not aware or seen first hand of issues surrounding sleep or hibernate to be honest.

mickledore said:
Would no sleep mode mean the machine stayed on churning away and eating power?
Click to expand...

nope. probably a few pence to your bill if anything. even with my i7 desktop at full pelt gaming it's negligible cost electricity wise over a few hours.
 
Yep desk top.
Monitor powers down after 5 mins at present.
Has SSD and HDD. Are you suggesting powering down just HDD and leaving SSD running? Not sure I'm clever enough to set that up. Could easily run them both down after an hour. I can do that!
 
neil_g said:
im not aware or seen first hand of issues surrounding sleep or hibernate to be honest.



nope. probably a few pence to your bill if anything. even with my i7 desktop at full pelt gaming it's negligible cost electricity wise over a few hours.
Click to expand...
Thanks. Mine's "only" an i5 non gamer.
So monitor off as now and the whole thing down in an hour? That sound reasonable?
 
I don't have a hybrid (HDD + SSD) machine to experiment with, let alone running W7, but essentially that, yes. TBH I usually just shut my desktop down when I'm not using it for more than a few hours.
 
I've had a play with this but can't find anywhere to set an automatic shut down after a set period of time.
Anyone know how to set this up?
Google is not much help!
 
Power settings in control panel, then turn off hard disks. It won't shut the computer off (in the comment above I meant that I shut it down manually) but will spin down the HDD until it's needed.
 
Thanks, I've already done that, but would like to programme a complete power down if possible
 
When I had the initial problems I was given instructions as to how to set up hibernate on a desk top. It's there, just not normally visible except on lap tops. I wonder if there's something similar hidden away for shut down mode?
 
Maybe an application is set to wake your PC from sleep\hibernation. You can do this in task scheduler.
 
Problem sorted, I hope.
I went back to Chillblast to ask if it was possible to set up an automatic complete closedown after a specified time.
They have sent me a zip file which will allow me to set a specific time when the machine will totally switch off. Presumably this is a bit of geek speak that is way beyond my pay grade!
 
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