The Steel Guitar Forum

Occasionally (these problems are the worse),
my computer won't come out of the sleep mode.
After trying, it may have a black screen with a flashing curser OR it may be streaked with dashed, colored lines across the bottom third of the monitor. Other times it awakens just fine. Could it be memory,
video card, or ???.

I had an older IBM Aptiva (12Mhz Pentium 1) with WIN95 and it was 50/50 on whether it would "wake" from standby. IBM posted several things on their support site but nothing really helped. The Aptiva also had a "wake on ring" function that was supposed to wake the PC if the telephone rang so it could answer the call, either for voice mail or to receive a fax but that function never worked reliably either and eventually IBM reluctantly started telling people not to use that function.

I now have a Compaq Presario, that came with WIN98, and when I first got it, the waking from sleep mode was a major issue. There were a lot of postings on the Compaq support forum about that. Compaq tried several fixes and most didn't work reliably. However, they did find that not turning off the hard disks in the setup for standby seemed to make it more reliable. There was also a BIOS setting that had to do with standby that was changed but I don't recall what the change was.

Since I changed to DSL, which is on-line all the time, I leave the PC running and only put the monitor in standby. However, I have had one or two times that the monitor would not "wake".

Actually, I don't think the standby/power saver functions really are that reliable. Obviously some power will be saved by powering down certain circuits but you are still not completely powering the equipment off. I also go back to the "old school" of not frequently powering equipment off/on and one of the reasons I leave the PC running during the day.

When I leave mine in sleep mode, it gets hot and starts to smell. I don't use that function anymore. Also I seen on the news here, two different times, when someones computer burned their house down when left on overnight or while they were gone. Two people died in a trailer about 3 months ago from a computer caused fire. I leave mine on during the day, but I turn it off at night. This might be hard on the computer, but I would not feel comfortable leaving in on at night after seeing this on the news.

Fred, I guess I should clarify keeping my PC on. I power it up in the morning and it's left on till I'm done at night. If I'm going to be out for an extended period (3 or 4 hours) I will power it down, but generally it's on all day.

What I'm alluding to is those that power it on, do what they have to do and then power it off. Come back 30 minutes or an hour later and power it back on do what they want to do and then power it back off. etc, etc. That's what's hard on electronic equipment.

I don't use sleep mode at all on my home machine.

On the laptop, I leave it on, just to conserve power, and to keep from running batteries completely down if I forget and leave it unattended while it's on.

But I always power it back down, and back on again, before using it.

Sleep mode just isn't reliable.

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The Unofficial Photographer of The Wilkinsons

Are you using Windows ME? If so, that mode is "Hibernate", and I had the same thing happen to me on my work computer. The HP help person said not to use it due to some kind of a glitch with certain computers.

I have an HP 4440 that wouldn't return from "sleep" mode. Finally I tried to exit "sleep" mode and just left the damn thing alone. I found that it eventually comes back on its own. I just don't know whether it will restore in one minute or 15. To date, it has always restored after some time. The processor always comes back immediately but the moniter stays dead.

Bruce: I use Cntrl>Alt>Delete, and I get a window up and use "end task", which returns me to the desktop. (Win98SE)

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ree-00-dee-doo

I have to disagree about turning the PC off when not in use. You knew someone would disagree, right??

I've worked in electronics since 1955 and computers since 1972. I'm not a degreed engineer but I have had a 2nd Class FCC phone license and a general class amateur license. For the last 24 years that I worked, it was in networking and computers and as a hardware help desk manager for a large governement agency with offices throughout the US. At the help desk, we have found equipment that is left powered on during the day, as opposed to powering it off during breaks or lunch time, tends to have less hardware failures. It was a constant fight with GSA, as they were only interested in what electrical and A/C energy that could be saved not what the additional costs would be in downtime and hardware failures.

As far as the "green" mode or "sleep" mode or whatever you want to call it, as long as the cooling fan continues to run (and I've never seen one of the newer "green" machines that didn't keep the fan going) there shouldn't be any "baking" of equipment. Even in the "green" mode there is still power applied to the logic, so it's not like powering down.

For years IBM was adamant about not powering down terminals or printers. When the government came out with the "green" concept and saving energy became the in thing, IBM came out with new instructions that said it was safe to turn monitors and printers off when not in use. That was implemented and almost immediately we had an increase in 3192 monitor (power supply) failures.