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I have windows 7 professional installed. I've been using sleep mode for years to turn my computer 'off' and only reboot or actually power down when absolutely necessary. In fact, I even had the 'Shut down' button changed to 'Sleep'

Yesterday. It was suddenly greyed out. I could no longer use it.

Yesterday, I had removed all my Nvidia Display drivers because why did I need them without the card?

Two days ago, my Geforce GTX 480 had died and I had to remove it from the system so that I could use the onboard video dvi port to keep using my computer. (with the graphics card in, it would default to that and crash on boot up)

A little digging around has brought me to this:

C:\Windows\system32>powercfg -a The following sleep states are available on this system: Hibernate The following sleep states are not available on this system: Standby (S1)
        The system firmware does not support this standby state.
        The VGAPNP.SYS display driver does not support standby.  Please consult your hardware vendor for an updated display driver. Standby (S2)
        The system firmware does not support this standby state.
        The VGAPNP.SYS display driver does not support standby.  Please consult your hardware vendor for an updated display driver. Standby (S3)
        The VGAPNP.SYS display driver does not support standby.  Please consult your hardware vendor for an updated display driver. Hybrid Sleep

So apparently, my ability to use sleep mode is directly tied to my video card and video drivers. Which explains why it's grayed out, I think. But now I have a bigger question:

Why is my sleep mode directly tied into my video card drivers?

Since it's a function of windows, and graphics cards are essentially optional in some cases, I don't see why these two things should affect each other.

I'm aware of this question: Why is a video card needed to put my system in sleep mode? but it isn't answered. And he's more or less asking how he still can, I'm asking why they are related.

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2 Answers 2

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Putting a system to sleep is not as simple as turning off the display and spinning down the CPU. Windows has to talk to each hardware driver to get it to enter a low power state. Otherwise your display will be off and your CPU will be spun down, but a USB-connected or PCI-connected device for example might still be active and taking power.

So sleep mode involves all drivers of your system, similar to power on or power off events. This includes the display driver.

Drivers for some hardware depend on ACPI functions, and this involves talking to your system's ACPI/UEFI firmware.

The system firmware does not support this standby state

The VGAPNP.SYS sounds like a generic driver Windows selected as a last resort for your graphics card, which could happen if you removed your Nvidia drivers but didn't install the ones for your integrated video. VGA is a pre-ACPI standard that has been around since 1987, and this driver or a similar one has probably been on even old desktop NT versions of Windows from 90's, so it wouldn't be surprising if it didn't support sleep states at all. I could be wrong but it's not uncommon for the generic "last resort" drivers to only support the lowest-common-denominator of features.

  • Find out using CPU-Z or other similar utility what the integrated video device is in your system and look for an updated driver for it as it says.
  • Alternatively/additionally you may make sure your system's chipset drivers are updated as the proper chipset driver can "correct" these types of issues.
  • If your integrated video device is Intel hardware try Intel's driver update utility.
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Do you have any driver installed for the video card you are using? The drivers will be responsible for reporting to the system how it handles sleep mode (and subsequently how it handles being awoken).

If the machine can't determine how to sleep a device based on what it's driver reports, sleep mode is disabled as it wouldn't be able to 'guess' what to do with that particular device. It's not so much tied to video, as it is tied to all your devices. It's only now you're using a device that doesn't comply.

Further reading here:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff543162(v=vs.85).aspx

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  • It's onboard video out at this point, so I would believe that whatever drivers came with the motherboard itself would be responsible for the onboard video drivers as well.
    – ooklah
    Dec 22, 2015 at 16:48
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    Onboard video requires drivers as well, it'll be using the bare standard VGA driver otherwise. The only difference with onboard is it's part of the north bridge or CPU rather than an expansion card. Install the drivers for your device and you'll be able to resume using sleep mode. The likelyhood is your machine has never had the driver installed as it's always used the Nvidia card instead of the onboard.
    – Jonno
    Dec 22, 2015 at 16:50

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