Suspend option has disappeared from XP

[Guest]

I have been running XP Pro on a Dell Dimension 4100 for months now. I had screen time out, disk drive timeout, and hibernation all working fine. Now, something has changed on my system, which has made the Suspend and Hibernation options disappear from the Power Options property page.

I have all the critical XP updates installed. I also have all the driver updates installed. I do NOT have all the XP update installed. But, this was the case when power management was appearing on the machine.

Under computer in the device manager, I see the ACPI device. There are also some other ACPI drivers loaded under System Devices.

The only things I can think of that I have been touching lately are the 1394 drivers and the hard disks. I was capturing some video for the first using XP and the performance sucked, so I went back to the original drivers shipped with the Pinnacle DV200 card. These drivers were not signed but the performance improved went back to a useful zone where frames were not dropped any longer. I have deleted these drivers and returned to the originals. I have also disabled the 1394 controller to try and test if any changes here could be causing the problem.

I also was playing with the power management in the firmware of the drives. I have an IBM drive which has power management turned on and a happy driver. I also have a Maxtor, which says power management is OFF using a generic Hitachi utility, but the driver says it is happy as well. The Maxtor drive is the slave drive so I was able to even unplug it to test if any changes there made a difference. In the past, when the power management of one of these drives was not set up correctly, the machine would not suspend, but at least the Suspend and Hibernation options still appeared in the property sheet!

Perhaps the OS told me at one point that it was going to change the functionality of the machine, but I don’t remember it happening. So, it doesn’t have power management any longer and will not give me a clue as to what has changed. Any suggestions?

 

[Guest]

I figured it out. I was pointed to a tool called "sigverif.exe" which is included in either service pack 1 or 2. Anyway, using this tool in advanced mode allows you to check all of your drivers to make sure they are "signed". The older drivers that are not signed, may not support power management. I had five unsigned drivers in my "windows'system32/driver" directory. One of these was causing the problem even though it didn't look to be attached to a device any longer! How about that?

So, I guess the moral of the story is this: If you are having power management problems or can't see power management at all in Windows XP, scan your drivers using "sigverif.exe" and check them one by one by removing them from devices AND the directory to see if one of them is the culprit.