PCA Forums

Ok, I'm absolutely at my wits end on this and I'll give you the breakdown but first let me start by saying that I've been unsuccesful at having WinXP go into standby two consequtive times. This may be unrelated to my curret issue but I felt I had to mention this anyway. What happens is I'll cold start the computer, use it for whatever and put it into standby. Ok fine, its works when woken but if I try to put it back into standby it hangs on the "Windows is going to standby" screen.
That having been said I'll get to my real issue and the events that lead up to it: Yesterday I got home from work and woke the computer from standby. Everything was going well when I had to go back to work and I went to put it back into standby (having forgotten its going to hang...) When I realized that it had crashed again I hit the reset button, but thought better of it and held the power button down until the system shut down (by this point, the WinXP loading screen was up). When I got back, and powered up the system after the WinXP load screen would come up and I'd get the blue background of the login screen, but no login prompt. There's visible HD activity but after waiting 20 mins the login prmopt still doesn't come up. If you restart you get the option of Safe mode or normal start but both options render the same result: blue screen, but no login. What's going on, please help!

When you get the option of safe mode or normal isn't there also an option to load last known good configuration? I fthere is I would give that a try

Had to edit my previous message to correct it from "hibernation" to "standby". dadx2mj, using "last known" gets the same thing as the rest which is nada! Thanks though!

Argh... WinXP.

Try booting off the CD and go into the repair console. You should have an option to restore to a previous restore point or something.

Not sure - haven't done much XP troubleshooting yet. At the very least there will be a repair option of some sort.

If it works like Win2K, you may need to have your hard drive controller drivers ready on a floppy in order to allow the repair console to access the drives if you have a UDMA/100 controller that's treated as a SCSI device.


As for the sleep/suspend issue.... I've found sleep mode support to be VERY inconsistent between different hardware and different vendors. All it takes is one misbehaved device or driver and your box won't wake up.

My rule of thumb is that if you're running a retail bought system with all the original hardware, then it's safe to use sleep mode. If you add any hardware and sleep mode acts up then either lose the new hardware or lose sleep mode.

If you built your own system, or upgraded the OS from an earlier version of Windows then I wouldn't even bother with sleep mode. Chances are it won't work right and you'll just get aggravate
d.

Realistically sleep mode serves no useful purpose. It's almost as energy efficient to just enable Monitor Sleep and HDD Spin Down. That essentially kills the two biggest power users, and also reduces wear and tear on the two devices that do wear out with constant use (monitor and HDD).


The only other moving parts are the fans, and when the bearings wear out they're cheap to replace.

Your CPU, ram and other hardware couldn't give a rat's behind whether it's in sleep mode or not. Modern CPUs running on modern OSes (ME, 2K,XP) all go into idle when not being used.

Meanwhile a fatal crash/lockup is more likely to happen in sleep mode than during power up - there's quite a LOT that Windows has to do, all without a hitch from poorly written drivers and balky hardware, during wake up from sleep mode. Any one thing goes wrong it'll lock up.

Even on a new Dell (which I consider the pillar of stable retail computers) you'll occasionally see it hang when waking up from sleep mode. I've yet to see a Compaq Presario desktop that DIDN'T lockup in sleep mode at least once a month.

Also, on Win98 systems at least and depending on the NIC, sleep mode will often cause other computers on your network to fail to see the computer after it wakes up.


I leave all my systems running 24/7 with only monitor and HDD sleep enabled, and that's what I recommend to my clients.

Hope you can get it back up and running without a hassle. When you do, I suggest you ditch sleep mode.