Power Management

  • Article

This section contains troubleshooting information for the Windows 2000 Professional power management system.

For more information about troubleshooting problems with devices, see Device Management and Troubleshooting Tools and Strategies in this book.

The following sections describe common problems, and ways to resolve them.

The system stops responding

In the past, when a system stopped responding, the cause was improperly configured hardware. With ACPI-compliant systems, it is more likely the result of a device driver that cannot support a certain power state, such as sleep. When Windows 2000 Professional attempts to switch the device to the unrecognized state, the system stops responding. One common cause for this is the use of older device drivers designed for Windows NT.

Try the following solutions:

  • Disable power management to see if the system still stops responding.

  • Obtain an updated driver for the device in question. If none is available, you cannot enable power management.

The computer appears to stop responding while in standby mode

To determine whether the problem is due to standby mode, hibernate mode, the shutdown of the monitor, or the shutdown of the disk drive, on the Power Schemes tab in the Power Options Properties page, set three of the four options to Never and the fourth to its original setting. Allow the time out to occur, and determine whether the system appears to stop responding. Isolate the failure by trying each of the four combinations, first test the monitor timer, then the disk drive timer, then the system standby timer, and then the system hibernate timer.

The system appears to stop responding after turning off the monitor

The system can stop responding for one of the following reasons:

  • The system responds, but the display does not properly reinitialize.

  • The display adapter does not fully support the commands made from Windows to turn off the display.

Try the following solutions:

  • While the display is turned off, move the mouse or press a key on the keyboard to try turning it back on. If this fails, perform the following keystrokes:
    CTRL+ESC
    r
    a:
    ENTER
    If the system is working, but the display is simply not properly initializing, this causes the system to look for a floppy disk in the A: drive. Check for disk activity in this drive.

  • Contact your hardware vendor for more information.

The system appears to stop responding after shutting off the disk drives

Contact your hardware manufacturer for more information.

The disk drive does not support spin-down functionality or is malfunctioning

Contact your hardware manufacturer for more information.

The system appears to stop responding while in standby mode

The system could stop responding for one of the following reasons:

  • The system responds, but the display does not properly reinitialize.

  • An application or driver is allowing the system to go on standby but is causing the system to stop responding.

  • The BIOS causes the system to stop responding.

Try the following solutions:

  • While the display is turned off, move the mouse or press a key on the keyboard to try turning it back on. If this fails, perform the following keystrokes:
    CTRL+ESC
    r
    a:
    ENTER
    If the system is working, but the display is simply not properly initializing, this causes the system to look for a floppy disk in the A: drive. Check for disk activity in this drive.

  • Close all applications. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL, and end all tasks except Explorer and Systray. Uninstall third-party system management programs, such as crash protectors, memory managers, and performance enhancement utilities.

  • Disable all devices in Device Manager except the display adapter(s), the mouse, anything under the USB Devices category (if you have either a USB keyboard or a USB mouse), and anything under the System Devices category. Restart the computer. If the system goes on standby successfully, re-enable one half of the currently disabled devices. Restart again. If the system continues to go on standby successfully, re-enable half of the remaining disabled devices. Otherwise, disable the devices you just re-enabled, and re-enable the devices that were disabled. Continue in this manner until the offending device is pinpointed.

  • Contact your hardware vendor for more information.

The system cannot go into standby mode

You attempt to put your computer into Hibernate mode, and you receive the following error message:

The system cannot go to standby mode because the driver <drive>\<device driver name> failed the request to standby.

The system might not go into standby mode for the following reason:

  • The device driver does not support a sleep level sufficient for hibernation. This can be the result of out-of-date device drivers.

Try the following solutions:

  • Verify that you are using a device driver written for Windows 2000.

  • Verify that the device itself supports hibernation and that you are using the latest driver. To find current drivers, see the Windows update link on the Web Resources page at https://windows.microsoft.com/windows2000/reskit/webresources .

The computer cannot go into a Hibernate mode unless every device installed on the computer supports hibernation.