X40 EXTREMELY slow to hibernate

[jmartine]

I have an X40 (238866GU) that takes about 15-20 minutes to complete hibernation. The "preparing to hibernate" step is fast, but it's the progress bar step that takes about 15 minutes. It returns from hibernation quickly as well.

It used to hibernate nice and fast, but a few months ago this problem started. I thought it might be because of a fragmented hard drive, so I deleted a bunch of stuff, so that I had 10 GB free, and defragmented. That did not help. I have 1 GB of RAM, but it shouldn't take 15 minutes to hibernate.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

-Joe

[pianowizard]

My 1.2GHz X40 had 1.5GB of RAM and it took only 20 seconds to get into hibernation. When was the last time you shut down the system? If it was a long time ago, try it once and see if that helps.

[christopher_wolf]

What are the kind of programs and what are they doing when it tries to hibernate?

[jmartine]

I reboot all the time, even right before hibernation. It takes about the same amount of time to hibernate, even if there are no applications running.

-Joe

[pianowizard]

You said the problem started several months ago. Did you install any new software at around that time? Try uninstalling it.

[jmartine]

I'm not really sure, since it's been so long ago. I just tried the following:

Stopped all of the 3rd party system tray apps.
Went into Task Manager, looked up all of the processes, and ended all of the 3rd party ones, with the exception of the Norton Antivirus things and the ones from IBM/Lenovo.
Then I tried hibernating again, and it was still just as slow.

I next rebooted, and stopped at the login screen. I tried a hibernate form there, without logging in as any user. Still just as slow.

-Joe

[jmartine]

I just thought I'd let everyone know that I found the solution to the slow hibernation problem. It turns out that write caching was disabled on the hard drive. Once I enabled it, it started hibernating nice and fast again.

-Joe

[fschwep]

I just thought I'd let everyone know that I found the solution to the slow hibernation problem. It turns out that write caching was disabled on the hard drive. Once I enabled it, it started hibernating nice and fast again.

-Joe

Good tip. Had the same problem with my T42, and re-enabling write caching did the trick. I had disabled write caching on all drives as I use an external HD as well as USB sticks, flash cards with an adapter, etc., and wanted to avoid any data loss or corruption. Now I have turned write caching back on just for the internal harddrive and it hibernates in about 10 seconds instead of half an hour or so...
Must be something with ThinkPads in general or with Windows XP power management.