Difficulty waking computer

0

Since installing a new graphics card I am having occasional difficulty waking my PC from sleep. The computer lights up but doesn't do anything (no reading from hard disk at all). Forced to cut power and turn back on. Last time I did this there was some difficulty getting it to turn on afterwards, and a long checkdisk run had to be performed.

The new graphics card is working perfectly, machine is a fairly new Windows 8.1 machine. This coma-state occurs about 10% of sleeps.

Anybody have any idea how I can diagnose what's wrong?

Stumbler

Posted 2016-12-27T19:34:52.300

Reputation: 256

How powerful is your power supply? Is it sufficient for your entire system, plus the new graphics card? (Graphics cards eat power like candy.) – Hydraxan14 – 2016-12-27T19:53:51.670

@Hydraxan14 Good point but I think so. I believe that the new graphics card uses less electricity than old one (one power connector instead of two). – Stumbler – 2016-12-28T00:48:56.107

Answers

1

Update Drivers

I have a good reason for this answer!

Resuming from sleep mode is a complicated action. Buggy drivers for your graphics card could prevent it from successfully resuming, hence the black screen.

(The FOSS graphics drivers in Linux often have this issue.)

If you've already got the best drivers installed, I'd recommend not using sleep mode. Use hibernation mode instead. This will force the card to completely reinitialize, just like rebooting the computer.

Hydraxan14

Posted 2016-12-27T19:34:52.300

Reputation: 578

I think this sounds like a decent bet. Will mark as answered unless it turns out to be a different issue. – Stumbler – 2016-12-28T00:50:46.003

@Stumbler (3 months later) did this turn out to be the issue? – Hydraxan14 – 2017-04-05T15:51:34.773

Sort of. Power options on machine had hard disk turn off after a certain period (about an hour of being asleep) which it often couldn't "wake" from. The hint for this was the lack of disk reading when attempting to wake the machine. Explicitly telling the machine to hibernate sometimes got around this problem, but permanent solution seems to be to disable hard disk turning off in power options. – Stumbler – 2017-04-05T20:00:05.797

Asked: 2016-12-27T19:34:52.300

Viewed: 30 times

Active: 2016-12-27T19:56:59.600