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I just replaced a busted motherboard on my Windows 7 computer, and it no longer sleeps as it had before. With my old motherboard, whenever I put the computer to sleep, the screen faded to black and then the computer turned off after a bit. Then, when I turned it back on, it went straight to the login screen. This felt more akin to hibernation, except that the computer was able to resume right away.

With my new motherboard, going to sleep does not turn off the computer. The screen goes black as before, and the computer resumes right away when I press the power button, but the power supply keeps running at full force. The hard drive and other components turn off, but the computer does not.

What explains this difference in behavior? Is this a motherboard/BIOS feature, or is something broken?

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4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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Looks like your old mainboard was using the "S3 mode" (Suspend to RAM, only RAM requires power) and your new mainboard only uses the "S1 mode" (Standby, nearly every component is still powered).

Most mainboards allow in the BIOS to specify whether the S1 or S3 mode should be used.

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  • The S3 option was there under ACPI settings and made everything work like before. Thank you!
    – Archagon
    Oct 28, 2011 at 4:47
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Are you sure that the power supply keeps delivering energy? I assume that it is just the fan that spins, which would mean that you old board had a feature to switch the power supplies fan off and you newer one does not.

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  • I think the video card spins as well. I'd like to know what this feature is called, if it exists, so that I can look out for it when buying my next motherboard.
    – Archagon
    Oct 27, 2011 at 8:18
  • Can you check which devices keep working exactly?
    – Michael K
    Oct 27, 2011 at 8:46
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Put your monitor to sleep. A computer that sleeps then wakes up, is like a human, it's sluggish, In my view, its better to let the pc run, idle and have the screen(s) asleep

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  • This answer doesn't explain the cause of the difference in behaviour.
    – miyalys
    Oct 4, 2015 at 19:13
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I wonder if my solution of the sleep problem i windows 7 can help anybody? When i turned my pc off by selecting SLEEP via START button my screen turned off but the pc was still running. After a clean boot I found out, that the problem was connected with use of the clock-gadget (activate = right-click on the screen). When starting the pc without using this gadget I have NOT experienced the problem since. I do not know if this is a part of the problem or the whole problem, but now I can set my pc into sleep mode and that is fine for me.

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