W2K Standby Blues

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ken
  • Start date Start date
K

Ken

I'm running W2K Professional, SP 4 on Dell Dimension 8100
desktop PC with Intel Pentium IV @ 1.7 GHz. The latest
FlashBIOS from Dell is installed.

For the longest time, since purchase, the 3Com NIC driver
was preventing the machine from entering stnadby, although
listed as ACPI compliant in Device Manager. Finally,
after an unanticipated need for a fresh installation and
system restore, including the latest NIC driver (which was
on the old installation as well), the PC entered standby
and resumed normally for a brief period.

NOW, HALF THE TIME, with the "Preparing to enter
Standby ..." message box displayed and has to be powered
off. and rebooted. "Ctrl - Alt + Delete", "Esc" and
anything else I can think of do nothing.

The other half of the time, the PC enters standby, but
pushing the power button (light blinking) turns the
backlight on continuously but the PC DOES NOT RESUME, AND
THE MONITOR COMES ON BUT INDICATES THAT IT IS STILL IN
POWER SAVING MODE AND INSTRUCITNG ME TO USE THE
pc "SETTINGS" TO REACTIVATE IT.

Dell offers a fix for the latter behavior, but the fix is
only for Windows XP and points one to its SP 1
(http://support.dell.com/us/en/kb/document.asp?dn=1071253).
The article seems to incriminate the "Pci.sys driver" for
this behavior. Is there a way to deal with this in W2K?
I've searched both Dell's and Microsoft KB archives
extensively but found no help for W2k.

Can anyone offer suggestions for fixing both problems?
Im desperate after wrestling with this for 2 years.

Thanks for any help you can provide!
 
Hey

3 Possible Reasons

1. What you want to do is do a Windows Update right now.
I mean it. You may be running SP 4 but there are actually
some updates recently that dealt exactly with this "standy
by" problem


2. If you're updates happen to be all complete, then its
definitely a hardware setting problem. Look over your NIC
driver setting, there is an option there that
allows/prevents standy if the card is busy. Uncheck that
option.


3. Not hardware setting but an actual hardware problem.
My suggestion is to get another NIC card just to see how
the comp would react. If all is well, keep the new card,
discard the old. it ceratinly isn't worth you're time
 
I've done the updates regularly, but seen nothing about
standby; will look again. Device manager allows setting
the NIC to "Allow computer to turn this device off to save
power" (under "Properties" > "Power management"), but I
find nothing about whether the NIC is busy or not.

However, this IS NOT the current problem. Formerly,
Windows gave a message that the device driver for the NIC
was preventing standby, but updating the driver to the
most recent version available fixed this.

NOW, The PC "hangs" on "Preparing to enter Standby" unless
I first disconnect the established DSL connection (right
click on the icon and choose "disconnect"). If I do that,
the PC enters standby, BUT IT WON'T RESUME, requiring a
hard shutdown by holding the power button in for 5
seconds or so.

Please help anyone!
 
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