Google

2011-02-27

Windows 7 SP1 does not want to sleep

I received my Systemax machine a couple of days ago. It came with Windows 7 x64 Home Premium Edition. I downloaded Windows 7 x64 SP1 from MSDN and installed it. Last night, I wanted to put it into sleep and suddenly got a BSOD  "Internal_Power_Error"

I immediately suspected SP1 to be the cause b/c it had shutdown just fine the night before I installed SP1. There was not anything in the system logs to give me a clue. A bit of search on Microsoft sites shows that some people are seeing the exact same behavior after installing SP1 with similar specs[1]

At work, I use RSAT. So reading it in Directory Service blog that it was NOT possible to install RSAT after SP1 was already bad news for SP1, this just added to that bad taste.

There is documentation here to troubleshoot Internal_Power_Error. Interestingly, first param stops at x08 while in my case it was x09.

The other interesting bit was that crash dump file was not generated. This hotfix is supposed to fix that. I installed it and noticed that I could now put the machine into sleep. Problem was that it did not come back up from it.

Another suggested workaround was to disable "Allow Hybrid Sleep" in Power Options (see screenshot above). I tried that and and also changed the Bios Power setting so that 'hitting "space bar" would Power up the machine'. That seems to work for me. I can now put the machine to sleep and bring it back up by hitting space bar.

[1] Here are my specs:

  • Asus Sabertooth x58 Motherboard (common)
  • Intel core i7-950 3.06GHz 8M 1366 CPU
  • 12GB DDR3 1600MHz PC3-12800 Memory
  • 2 x 1GB Radeon 5770 Card in ATI Crossfire
  • 24x DVD-RW w/ Lightscribe
  • 1 TB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s Hitachi HD








Update (03/05/2011):
Microsoft now has a KB article titled 'Windows 7 does not go to Sleep'. It does not cover BSOD I had but has some good suggestions. I especially liked the Powercfg command line query and disable methods:


To see the list of all devices that can wake the computer, run the following command:
> Powercfg -devicequery wake_armed

HID-compliant mouse
HID Keyboard Device
HID Keyboard Device (003)
Realtek PCI GBE Family Controller

To disable a specific device from waking the computer, run the following command, or use Device Manager:

> Powercfg -devicedisablewake "devicename"


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have had this same problem since installing SP1. After much Googling it appears to be a problem with disk controller drivers which use the SCSIport miniport (i.e. RAID controllers) Installing a hotfix from MS fixed the problem for me. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2495523