Leaving sleep mode produces a useless black screen [closed]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
When unlocking Windows 7 screen goes black

When I wake my laptop up from sleep mode, I get only a black screen. When this happens, I can see my cursor — which is responsive — and I can Ctrl+Alt+Delto get to the options screen... but all the options lead back to the black screen of nothingness. Nothing but the mouse movement and the options menu works. Even "restart" in the options menu does nothing.

The machine is a Lenovo T510 running Windows 7 Professional. My solution to date is a hard restart. Does anyone have a better suggestion?

Answer 1

An overwhelming majority of the time, these issues are usually caused by a peripheral driver or a software application that doesn't properly wake up from sleep mode.

Make sure all the drivers are up to date. Make sure Windows itself is completely up to date. If neither of those help, try removing or disabling unnecessary software services and devices from the machine until you find the culprit. (Unplug any USB devices, turn off the wireless radios with the master switch on the side, etc). Note that it may turn out to be something you can't live without (or it might be something that you simply can't disable so you never figure it out at all).

That said, issues like this are just one of many reasons sleep mode is a bad idea unless you can't avoid it.