Vista freezes after standby

[Andreas Y.]

I leave my laptop on at night. In the morning I usually find a black screen,
lights flash normally (sometimes the HDD light shows activity), the keyboard
responds to keystrokes. I cannot see anything on the screen even if I move
the mouse, press keys, several other attempts. The only thing I can do is
press the power button for some seconds to power off. Can I do something
other than reformat?

 

[Mephisto]

I leave my laptop on at night. In the morning I usually find a black
screen, lights flash normally (sometimes the HDD light shows activity), the
keyboard responds to keystrokes. I cannot see anything on the screen even
if I move the mouse, press keys, several other attempts. The only thing I
can do is press the power button for some seconds to power off. Can I do
something other than reformat?

Are you using hibernation or standby mode? If you are using hibernation then
pressing the power button just halfway in should bring it out of
hibernation. Or it could be a video card driver issue. Vista has had issues
with a few cards when trying to come out of stanby mode. BTW, leaving your
laptop on overnight could pose a fire risk. I would turn it off when going
to bed. Is it connected to the internet when you leave it on overnight?

 

[David B. Mathews]

my desktop has done the same thing. It is a brand new Dell XPS 720 H2C. I
now have the latest and greatest NVidia drivers. Mine only did it about 4
times in the month I have had it.

 

[BlueGlide]

press the power button for some seconds to power off. Can I do something
other than reformat?

I had the same problem with Vista running on my ECS 2.8 GHz system.
It would happen every few days and the only way to get going again was
to do a hardware forced shutdown as you have been doing.

Finally about two months ago, I went into Control Panel>Power Options
and set "Computer goes to sleep: to NEVER.

That took care of the problem and I have not seen it since.

Vista is new and there are still some compatibility bugs between it
and the motherboard's implementation of the ACPI Power Management
standards. Best to disable and ignore for now and hope that SP1 will
fix it!