Advanced Power Management Issues

Having already broached the subject of power management in Chapter 2, let’s focus on the ways in which power management may interact badly with your hardware.

As you recall, power management’s job is to let the parts of your system go into a lower power consumption mode when you’re not actively working with it. Sometimes this can lead to you thinking a device is malfunctioning when Windows has put it into a sleep mode from which Sleeping Beauty…oops, wrong story…your hardware cannot awaken.

A common example of this is when your screensaver kicks in after the configured number of minutes of keyboard inactivity. Power Management should terminate these suspended modes as soon as you press a key or move your mouse. The problem occurs when you return to your keyboard and find yourself stuck in the screensaver or in some way prevented from returning to your normal session without restarting your PC. A hard boot may be required to break out of it. Enough of these forced restarts, and you start to sense a disaster in the making. You might start seeing fragmented files if you had data open and unsaved on your desktop. You could develop a bad sector on your hard drive. Even shy of a disaster, it’s not good to have to work this way; those computers who do display these types of lockups tend to do it frequently.

Hardware drivers are a common source of such problems. For this reason, you should see a noticeable improvement in such problems after updating a driver. Interestingly enough, it doesn’t have to be a driver for the specific device involved in the suspension, such as a monitor or hard drive, that causes the problem. I had a USB graphics tablet, for example, that frequently caused these problems with Standby mode whenever it was plugged in and in use before the system went idle.

Sadly, just updating a device driver isn’t always the answer.

An out-of-date BIOS is another possible cause, requiring a BIOS update. Malfunctioning hardware itself could also be the cause, the solution for which is to isolate the device and replace or repair it.

One thing to consider here—at least as a short-term workaround until you can update, upgrade, or otherwise resolve your dilemma—is to disable power management. On my system, for the best effect, I usually need to disable power management both in BIOS Setup under the Power Management category and also within Windows, as discussed in Chapter 6.



PC Disaster and Recovery
PC Disaster and Recovery
ISBN: 078214182X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 140
Authors: Kate J. Chase

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net