Why am I having issues waking up my machine (and how to debug)?

Question

Recently I switched from buying off the shelf machines to building at work (Building AMD FX-6100 or FX-8100, older ones are A8 series or Phenom II, with Windows 7 Pro). Without going in to the details of that, everything has been great, except that some of the machines are having an issue where they will not 'wake up' from sleep mode.

The machines run fine all day as long as they are not set to sleep (or are in use). They are also 100% if shut down (not put to sleep).

However, if the user puts the machine to sleep, or it goes to sleep, many times they are unable to wake it up. Pressing keys, moving mouse, etc. no help. In fact, worse is that the machine will no longer boot! It goes through the bios screen, then you have no video (black screen) when Windows starts to load.

Even if you hard power off the machine, that usually does not fix it! I found if you press the reset button while windows starts to load, that sometimes does the trick. It's as if Windows is in some kind of strange state.

Just wondering if anyone else has seen this or has any ideas?

The motherboards are all Gigabyte, GA-A75M-S2V - and I think it may be related to this board, since I have some newer Gigabyte boards that so far do not have this issue. I have updated the bios on all of them, so that should be ok.

Answer 1

Why would the OS matter? ...a very asinine, meaningless and irrelevant inquiry which was formulated in the absence of any deductive reasoning.

The goal is to attempt to learn from (and/or attempt to aid) others as much as possible, not waste their time.

Now, lets attempt to derive a conclusion/solution for Mr. (or Dr.) Szretter's issue from something that is known.

To my knowledge, a system's capability of entering a Sleep or a Wake state are OS independent. However, inducing a sleep state after a desired time period can be and is set within the OS (any OS! i.e. Windows; Linux -any flavor; or a Mac OS) by the users or by someone who should not be.

Based on my basic understanding (illustrated below) I am offering a couple of ideas (following the illustration of the bases of my ideas/conclusions):

The Motherboard does what a normally functioning mother does; she instructs her dependents (in terms of a PC; dependents = peripheral hardware components); provides information to her dependents; she sets limitations; ensures her dependents are functioning normally/appropriately at the times she has instructed; she determines if and when they are to rest or sleep; when and how much food to intake (in terms of a PC = the magnitude and frequency of voltage to be distributed to and consumed by peripheral hardware components); and she ultimately determines the means in which her dependents are to wake from a rest or sleep state.

Ideas

1. in BIOS settings determine if the 'USB Wake Up from S3' exists as an option; if so, set to [Enabled]. this would give an installed USB device (mouse or keyboard) the ability to awaken your system from ACPI S3 sleep state.

2. in BIOS settings determine if the 'USB Legacy Function' exists as an option; if so, set to [Enabled]. this allows your keyboard to be used in MS-DOS

3. in BIOS settings determine if the 'PME Event Wake Up' exists as an option; if so, set to [Enabled]. this allows your system to be awaken from an ACPI sleep state by 'wake-up signal' from a PCI device

   This idea/suggestion is offered based on my experience in research laboratory setting...so, if you have a system(s) coupled to automated analytic instrumentation via a PCI interface I recommend this option; this is useful when one my have to take sample readings after large time intervals (or just a reading at an odd hour) and your system has fallen asleep...if this does not apply, then ignore

4. in BIOS settings determine if the 'Power On By Keyboard' exists as an option; if so, set to [Enabled]. this allows your system to be turned on by a PS/2 Keyboard wake-up event (pressing any key)

5. in BIOS settings determine if the 'Power On By Mouse' exists as an option; if so, set to [Enabled]. this allows your system to be turned on by a PS/2 Mouse wake-up event (moving mouse or any click action).