How do I get my laptop to wake up?

June 28, 2008 6:06 PM

My girlfriend's Dell 1501 laptop, running Vista, fully updated, won't wake up after it has been shut. How do you fix this? Thanks.

This is a problem both when the laptop is shut and when you manually put it in hibernation. Sometimes it wakes up, sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't, it requires a reboot

posted by doppler68 to computers & internet (2 comments total)

I have an HP dv8000 with the same issue. My workaround was setting the computer to "hibernate" instead of sleep when closing the lid. Sometimes the sound won't come back on, and I'll have to re-start, but it "works".
posted by hellojed at 9:17 PM on June 28, 2008

Somewhere around 20% of laptops have this issue, in my experience. For those 20%, you DO NOT want to close the laptop without shutting it down first. There is no simple fix, there is no complex fix; it is some kind of inherent flaw that exists between the Windows Sleep/Hibernate issue and your particular hardware/software setup.

Feel free to look for a fix, but from experience you'll just be wasting your time. This has been a problem for at least eight years--across many flavors of Windows, manufacturers, hardware sets, etc. At the end of the day, Hibernation is flawed.
posted by Phyltre at 11:41 PM on June 28, 2008