T43 Sleeps, but does not resume/wake up (cold boots instead)

[JHaislet]

I've had this T43 since about 2005 and it's worked great.

Today, I've started experiencing a weird problem:

I put the T43 into suspend/sleep mode (Fn + F4), yet a few minutes later, when I open the lid to resume/wake it back up, it simply does a cold-boot and loads up Vista (with the vista error that the machine was not properly shutdown).

I've had Vista on this machine since October 2006 and it's been fine. I've had Vista SP1 on this machine since March 12 and it's been fine as well, so I don't think it's a Windows issue.

Any ideas?

[Johan]

Sounds very annoying!! Not that I have experienced this myself, or have any specific idea of what might be the cause... but the following threads discuss something that seems related: T43p hangs on resume from sleep and black screen when awakening from sleep (see especially the posts by jhgsoc of Thu Mar 20, 2008 5:28 pm and the one by ryengineer of Sun Dec 23, 2007 2:55 pm).

Maybe it is possible for you to "roll back" to a System Restore point created a while back - if, say, the ThinkVantage System Update has done something "behind your back" which might be the cause? This has happened to me - in particular updating the ATI drives have caused me having BSOD's a while back. Fortunately, I had an Acronis True Image image that I could simply restore.

Good luck with the error-hunt...

Best regards,

Johan

[richk]

Look in the event log.

[JHaislet]

I think it has something to do with my loose 6-cell battery.

I just noticed that this battery actually moves around quit a bit, even with the tabs locked in. I just did a little test, put the laptop on battery & put it to sleep, without moving it, I waited 10 minutes and it woke right back up as normal.

The laptop must be loosing power when I move it (I assume the battery is shifting just enough to power down the ram, thus loosing all sleep info).

I've attempted to shim the battery with a couple strips of clear packing tape (in hopes of keeping it still). We'll see if it works.

For some reason, I think my 6-cell sanyo battery is slightly under-sized, as my 9-cell fits in much tighter (snaps in actually). Yet, the 6-cell hasn't given me any trouble for the last couple of years.

[alexd]

This isn't much help, but this problem recently started happening on my T60, which I have had since August, 2006. It happen on AC and battery. I'm running Win XP Pro SP2.

For me, I think it's some sort of motherboard problem because as soon as this started happening, I began to get Error 0176: System has been tampered with when loading the BIOS.

[richk]

As a work-around, you could hibernate, rather than suspend. It isn't as fast as suspend, but it is faster than a cold boot and it does save open applications.