Lost hibernate & screensaver capabilities

[Jim]

Somewhere in the last couple weeks my two year old HP running
XP, SP2, lost the ability to run screen savers (which I was not
using) and to go into Standby or Hibernate mode. The latter
no longer shows up in the power options menu. The shutdown
screen displays a greyed out option to stand by, and the HP
hibernate button no longer does anything. The screensaver
wait time is greyed out and cannot be set. It says 1 minute
but screen saver does not run. My enegery star option to
turn off the monitor still works.

considerable e-mail traffic with HP support (and trying what
they suggested) and a phone call from their Advance
Support Group resulted in the following conclusion "You
have a Windows problems and we suggest you live with
it. Turn the power off when you won't be using the PC"

The other option suggested was a "non-destructive
Windows recovery" using the partition with which the
HP came to restore its original windows config. The
tech I actually spoke to discouraged that, and it does
seem like in the best case it would create a lot of work
having to reinstall a lot of patches and the two SP's,
and in the worst case might blow away/break some
other later installed software, so I am inclined not to
go that route.

Just wondering if anyone else out there has any
other ideas for a fix, or whether as windows reload
would indeed cause problems with other s/w.

TIA
Jim

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

All the problems you mention seem to center on the shutdown feature (ACPI,
and the "S3" settings in the BIOS).

My approach would be to open BIOS setup, and 'toggle' a few of the S3
settings back and forth, restarting after, to see if that might change some
registry entry as windows starts.

Open Device Manager, see the "Computer" item, and the ACPI below that. The
Properties there might show "Standard PC" instead of "Uni-processor..." or
whatever you need. (This would indicate a need for a better BIOS)

 

[Jim]

All the problems you mention seem to center on the shutdown feature (ACPI,
and the "S3" settings in the BIOS).

My approach would be to open BIOS setup, and 'toggle' a few of the S3
settings back and forth, restarting after, to see if that might change some
registry entry as windows starts.

Will try the above BIOS tweaks perhaps, but the entry per your note
below is indeed "Uni processor". I had reset the BIOS to default, as
one attempt to fix the problem, but that did not help.