When I need to pack my laptop up and take it with me I usually just close the lid and let it go into standby mode. This essentially just turns everything non-essential like the screen, hard drive, network card, etc off but keeps the computer’s memory alive. So when I get to where I’m going I just open the lid and my laptop resumes right where I left off. This is a great time saving feature since booting my laptop from a powered off state can take 5 minutes plus and I hate waiting.

The problem is that resuming from stand by doesn’t always work. I’d guess about 1 in 10 times there will be some kind of problem. Usually the power light will come on but the display stays off. I’d like to know what is causing the problem. Is it a problem with the hardware? I’m using a Dell Latitude D820 and my BIOS is patched up to the latest version. Is it the operating system? I’m running Windows XP SP2 and keep up to date with the latest patches. Or is it some device driver that isn’t doing what it is supposed to be doing?

My guess is that it’s a device driver problem. I would guess that when the OS is going into standby it has to notify every device driver in the system to allow it to get ready for standby. Later when you resume from standby the OS has to notify every device driver to tell it to resume. I would guess that bugs in the standby or resume code for any one of those drivers could cause this problem. How can I tell which one is the culprit? Event viewer doesn’t tell me anything. Is there some log like the windows boot log that would help me?

I found this How to troubleshoot hibernation and standby issues in Windows XP in the Microsoft knowledge base.

This statement in the knowledge base article:

Note After you restart the computer, you may want to run the Crash Analysis tool. This tool can help determine whether a driver is the cause of a problem. Drivers are the primary causes for hibernation and standby issues.

led me to the Microsoft Online Crash Analysis web page. This didn’t do anything for me since windows isn’t actually crashing it just isn’t resuming from standby which causes me to have to power the machine completely off and back on.

I have found that the problem happens less if I make sure no USB drives are plugged into my system, my bluetooth mouse is turned off and my wireless network adapter is turned off.

Do other operating systems like OSX or Linux suffer from this problem?

If anyone has any suggestions on how to fix this please post a comment.