Power management issue

[FalvinP]

I'm not sure if this is a Vista issue or a hard drive issue, so I thought I'd start here first.

I've had my new machine up and running for about a week and a half now. I had been turning it off each night, but I left it on a few nights ago.

The default Vista power management scheme was in effect. It shuts the video off after 20 minutes and the hard drive off after one hour.

When I got to it in the morning, everything seemed to be asleep. The power led on the case was flashing, as I knew it would, but the hard drive light was on steady. The keyboard was non-responsive, and the optical mouse light was out and was also non-responsive. Similarly, there was no response from the reset button. I had to hold down the power button for four seconds to get it to turn off altogether.

When I turned it back on, things seemed to be going normally, but did seem to take longer to do it's thing. At the screen with the horizonal moving bar it said "resuming windows." It's booted up to the desktop with no problem, although the hard drive light was on steady for several minutes. I was able to sucessfully go about my business (email, explorer etc) with the hard drive led on steady.

This situation is completely reproduceable. In order to provide details for this post, I set the video to turn off at one minute and the hard drive to turn off at five minutes.

The bios version on my motherboard is version 0603, build date 07/03/07.

The power settings in the bios are all set at the default, as I have never changed them. I don't know if it matters or not, but the Suspend mode ACPI is set to "auto."

During my research, I read that I should check out the Segate hard drive. I plan to use Sea Tools overnight to check this out.

I've also read that updating the bios sometimes helps with this type of thing.

This is not a super big issue, but I would like to know why it doesn't work properly. I usually turn the machine off each night. I've change the powermanagement settings so that the hard drive never gets turned off.

I've googled this situation, but have not come accross this exact issue.

If I haven't provided enought info to hopefully diagnose this problem, please let me know.

As always, thank you for your input.

[shadowpr]

I think this is a Vista issue. Check to see if you need any Windows updates. I think one of them might be something about this.

I had a similar issue, but I just set my hd to never go off since I'm folding now.

[FalvinP]

Thanks for the reply, Shadow. I updated Vista to whatever was available on 11/16. I then installed three updates on 11/21.

The first had to do with how Outlook 2003 determines what is junk mail.


The second was this:

Atheros - Networking - Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet 10/100/1000Base-T Controller

Installation date: ‎11/‎21/‎2007 1:28 PM

Installation status: Successful

Update type: Optional

Atheros Networking software update released in October, 2007


The third update was the Windows Defender update.

I just found info about the Ethernet controller. Someone reported that installing this uipdate hung up their system on XP. I wonder if this has anything to do with my issue? I also read that this updated driver was hard to uninstall.

I've heard that you should not install hardware drivers that come directly from Microsoft. Is this generally true?

Thanks for your help.

[shadowpr]

Originally Posted by FalvinP I've heard that you should not install hardware drivers that come directly from Microsoft. Is this generally true?

As a general rule, I never update drivers through windows update. I just go to the manufactures website and download them there.


None of those updates should have affected your problem, for good or bad.

Might want to read these, see if they help:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937556/en-us

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928135/en-us

[FalvinP]

Thanks for the info. After reading the two articles I guess I'll just wait until the service pack comes out. Thanks again.