Laptop will sleep if I close the lid but not if I select "Sleep" from the Start Menu

My HP Laptop 17 no longer sleeps when I select Sleep either from the Start Menu or a shortcut I've been using for six months. I put the computer to sleep one night, opened it again 20 hours later, and it stopped sleeping. It does sleep when I shut the lid, but because I use it with an external monitor and have to turn off this feature when it's connected to the monitor, this is still a problem, as now I can only get it to sleep when it's not connected to the monitor

I've tried resetting the power plans to default using powercfg, turned off wake timers, disabled any network-related standby settings, and turned off the Device Manager settings that allow me to use keyboards and mice to wake from sleep. I also did a System Restore to a known good time, but besides creating other problems, it didn't let the computer sleep. Hardware diagnostics and sfc /scannow reveal no problems.

I also created a new user account and the Sleep problem persists there.

What else can I do?

dbookbinder said:

no longer sleeps when I select Sleep

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Are you saying that it stays awake as if you had not clicked on 'Sleep'?

Do you use the laptop permanently plugged into mains power? I believe that using a laptop permanently plugged into mains power is not recommended. Whether this can cause the issue I don't know. Just something to consider. Maybe try using on battery power only to see if that affects the issue.

Consider a 'Restart' to refresh the OS.

Also consider whether you need to use 'Sleep' and use 'Shutdown' instead. In my view 'Sleep' is only for those occasions where you will be absent from the device for short periods of time, not overnight. 'Hibernate' is better than Sleep for long periods but that too has problems with corruption of the Hiberfil.sys file along with Fast Startup issues.

Using Shutdown and switching back on again next morning to start the system from scratch is more reliable than sleep or hibernate. I would only use 'Sleep' for short periods of absence.

wiganken said:

Are you saying that it stays awake as if you had not clicked on 'Sleep'?

Do you use the laptop permanently plugged into mains power? I believe that using a laptop permanently plugged into mains power is not recommended. Whether this can cause the issue I don't know. Just something to consider. Maybe try using on battery power only to see if that affects the issue.

Consider a 'Restart' to refresh the OS.

Also consider whether you need to use 'Sleep' and use 'Shutdown' instead. In my view 'Sleep' is only for those occasions where you will be absent from the device for short periods of time, not overnight. 'Hibernate' is better than Sleep for long periods but that too has problems with corruption of the Hiberfil.sys file along with Fast Startup issues.

Using Shutdown and switching back on again next morning to start the system from scratch is more reliable than sleep or hibernate. I would only use 'Sleep' for short periods of absence.

Click to expand...

Most recent laptops have a battery-saver setting, including this one, that prevents significant degradation when the computer is on AC. On a five-year-old Dell I keep plugged in, there has been almost no battery degradation. And, the computer has this issue whether plugged in or not -- I click Sleep, it starts the process, and wakes up after a few seconds. The day before, it didn't do that.

My next step was going to be refreshing the OS with a repair upgrade, but I was hoping to find a more granular fix if I can. Something caused this, and something should be able to reverse it. If none is forthcoming, I'll try the repair fix, which is usually pretty benign, even if it doesn't fix the problem.

By all means try to fix it. All I am suggesting is to consider if you actually need to use Sleep.
Your original post stated "I put the computer to sleep one night, opened it again 20 hours later" and I believe that power-off/power-on is better suited for long periods of inactivity such as this.
I understand that it is annoying when something stops working as it always has and frustrating trying to fix it. I'm just trying to offer a stress-free way of dealing with it.
Hope someone else can help. Good luck fixing it.

wiganken said:

By all means try to fix it. All I am suggesting is to consider if you actually need to use Sleep.
Your original post stated "I put the computer to sleep one night, opened it again 20 hours later" and I believe that power-off/power-on is better suited for long periods of inactivity such as this.
I understand that it is annoying when something stops working as it always has and frustrating trying to fix it. I'm just trying to offer a stress-free way of dealing with it.
Hope someone else can help. Good luck fixing it.

Click to expand...

I understand. I used to do what you suggest, but Sleep provides an easy way to keep everything open without writing an extra 60GB to the drive every day. For longer travel, I use Hibernation.

dbookbinder said:

My HP Laptop 17 no longer sleeps when I select Sleep

Click to expand...

How do you know?
Are you checking in Event viewer or can you see that it is still active?

dbookbinder said:

I use it with an external monitor

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I think you'll have to investigate the problem whilst not connected to the external monitor.
I think that will be the only way to identify what is & is not happening.

What power-sleep states are available to you?
Run this command to find out and do please post the response so we can all see.
PowerCfg -a



All the best,
Denis

@Try3
How do you know?
I know because now the screen goes dark and for a second the "on" indicator blinks, then it goes to full on and the screen lights up, with the logon screen displaying

I think you'll have to investigate the problem whilst not connected to the external monitor.
Bizarrely, this problem only occurs when the computer is not connected to an external monitor. When connected, with the "Close lid" action in the power plan set to do nothing, it sleeps when I click Sleep or run a nircmd shortcut to put it to sleep

What power-sleep states are available to you?
I can use S0 or S3. It came set to S0 but I hated Modern Standby and switched it about five months ago. Until a few days ago, on S3, it would reliably sleep regardless of which Sleep method I tried (close lid, Start menu choice, timeout, or shortcut).

It's not a major issue, since it will sleep when I close the lid (when not connected to a monitor), but I'm baffled as to why this occurred.
Here is the powercfg output. It's not actually true that S0 is not supported -- as I said, the computer came configured to use Modern Standby, and I used a registry setting to change it to S3

The following sleep states are available on this system:
Standby (S3)
Hibernate

The following sleep states are not available on this system:
Standby (S1)
The system firmware does not support this standby state.

Standby (S2)
The system firmware does not support this standby state.

Standby (S0 Low Power Idle)
The system firmware does not support this standby state.

Hybrid Sleep
The hypervisor does not support this standby state.

Fast Startup
This action is disabled in the current system policy.

1 It sounds like it is trying to achieve S3 Sleep but failing to do so.
You can check in Event viewer.
You could import the Event viewer, Custom view that I sue to check power-sleep state transitions.
Importing EV, CV - my post #23 - ElevenForum

2 I think it would also be worth checking behaviour in another user account [even if you have to create a new local one for the test].

3 "Until a few days ago"

dbookbinder said:

Until a few days ago, on S3, it would reliably sleep

Click to expand...

dbookbinder said:

It came set to S0 but I hated Modern Standby and switched it about five months ago

Click to expand...

Understood. That means that there is no reason to suspect that the change from S0 Modern standby to S3 Sleep was faulty [which I've seen].
Was there an update of anything a few days ago? A display driver, perhaps.

4 I use NirCmd as well

dbookbinder said:

a nircmd shortcut to put it to sleep

Click to expand...

NirCmd.exe standby, I assume.


All the best,
Denis

1 It sounds like it is trying to achieve S3 Sleep but failing to do so.
That's my impression. I'll try your Event Viewer filter when I have time to sift through the description in your post, so I know what I'm looking for. Alternatively, is equivalent info available from the Sleep Study report of powercfg?

2 I think it would also be worth checking behaviour in another user account [even if you have to create a new local one for the test].
I did create a new local account, and the result is the same as in the main account, so it's apparently not account related.

3 "Until a few days ago"
No, the S0 --> S3 transition went smoothly and has worked well. The most recent updates were security updates, though the display driver has also been updated. However, when I used System Restore to go back a few days, the behavior was the same. The exact date is a little hard to target as I've mostly been using the external monitor, keyboard, etc., where Sleep still works as expected. (Which seems counterintuitive.) So, it's possible that Sleep, when not connected to the monitor, stopped working earlier than I initially thought.

4 I use NirCmd as well
Yes.

Thanks for your help. This feature still works perfectly on my five-year-old Dell and six-year-old Lenovo running Windows 10 and S3, so the decision to make a computer work like a phone with Modern Standby seems to have complicated things.

1 I always check in Event viewer. I've never run or tried to understand a Sleep report.

2 That's good.

I'll have to have a think.


Denis

Try3 said:

1 I always check in Event viewer. I've never run or tried to understand a Sleep report.

2 That's good.

I'll have to have a think.


Denis

Click to expand...

I'm also seeing that now, whether connected to external monitor and drives or not, the computer no longer sleeps on timeout. I can get it to sleep with the Sleep command while connected and by shutting the lid while not.

Curiouser and curiouser.

I wonder what
powercfg /requestsoverride
will reveal.

It's been so long since I was last involved in chasing requestoverride problems that I am not sure how best to proceed. This 2020 summary is all I have noted about the topic.
powercfg -requestsoverride ditties - TenForums



Denis

Try3 said:

I wonder what
powercfg /requestsoverride
will reveal.

Click to expand...

SERVICE, PROCESS, and DRIVER all came up empty.

I also tried disabling all startup programs (even though Sleep worked fine with them enabled) and that made no difference.

dbookbinder said:

SERVICE, PROCESS, and DRIVER all came up empty.

Click to expand...

Good.


Personally, I would reinstall the display driver in case it has become corrupted.
This might or might not have an effect but there's no diagnostic test to identify the display driver as the culprit so reinstallation is the only way of deciding whether reinstallation was a waste of time or not.


All the best,
Denis

If you run the command powercfg waketimers from an elevated command prompt, does it also report that no wake timers are active on the system?

dbookbinder said:

The most recent updates were security updates, though the display driver has also been updated.

Click to expand...

Verify that the "Allow this device to wake the computer" checkbox on the Power tab in the Properties panel in Device Manager hasn't been changed for some of the devices that could potentially explain what you are experiencing. I always make sure that this option is unticked for anything that I don't require to be able to wake my laptop, but I found out years ago that installing a Windows update or a driver update can sometimes, for some devices at least, revert it back to its default setting. In addition, for each (physical) network adapter, (re-)verify that Wake-On-LAN (WOL) either is disabled altogether or is only allowed to wake the computer on magic packet.

hdmi said:

If you run the command powercfg waketimers from an elevated command prompt, does it also report that no wake timers are active on the system?

Find Wake Timers in Windows 11

This tutorial will show you how to get a list of wake timers that support or configured to wake the system in Windows 10 and Windows 11. A wake timer is a timed event that wakes the computer from a sleep or hibernate state at a specific time to perform scheduled tasks. Important wake timers...

www.elevenforum.com

Click to expand...

I turned off all wake timers when I was trying to get S0 sleep to work, and they're still off now that I'm using S3.

A new WiFi driver apparently re-enabled the WiFi wake on LAN settings, so I turned them off, as well as the "Allow to wake" setting for my mouse, which also got turned back on at some point. I do want to wake the computer with the keyboard, so I left the wake setting enabled there.

No change.

Try3 said:

Personally, I would reinstall the display driver in case it has become corrupted.
This might or might not have an effect but there's no diagnostic test to identify the display driver as the culprit so reinstallation is the only way of deciding whether reinstallation was a waste of time or not.

Click to expand...

I updated the display driver, as Intel had a new version. No change.