Unreliable resume from suspend?

Question

My desktop PC (home-built) resumes from suspend somewhat unreliably. I'd say that it resumes successfully about 85-90% of the time and hangs with a blank screen 5-10% of the time. As far as I can tell, the success or failure of the resume is completely random. I doubt it's a software problem because I triple boot Windows 7, Windows XP and Ubuntu and it's similar under all 3 operating systems.

If it matters, my system is overclocked, though other than the resume-from-suspend issue, it's definitely rock stable. What are some of the obvious suspects that would cause random, sporadic failures to resume from suspend?

Answer 1

Normally a resume from suspend failure is a result of a device not powering up again, or not powering up in time, after being put to sleep.

In my experience with Windows (I can't speak for Ubuntu power management), it can depend on BIOS settings, which devices can be switched off, and even which drivers are loaded for those devices.

So I'd recommend narrowing down your devices to see what's the actual cause of the error (difficult, I do completely understand), and then looking for driver or config changes for those devices.

While I appreciate it's unlikely that you're having the same issue across different OSes, it's therefore unlikely that drivers are to blame (but not impossible), and would point more towards hardware itself, or the BIOS settings, so start there.