T500 will not suspend - hangs

[atomz4peace]

I've been battling this since I've owned my T500 and even my T42 before that, and hoping someone else has any new ideas. I have a T500 with switchable graphics (radeon 3650), but leave it in high perf mode all of the time.

When it first boots, I can suspend easily. I suspend, undock, use on the train, suspend, etc... But after a few times or it seems like after a period of using it heavily, one of those times I hit suspend, the screen goes blank like usual, the disks spin, but the moon/suspend icon never comes on and it sits in this weird state until I power-cycle the thing. It's alive, but no screen so I can't see what's going on.

Does anyone else know what this is all about? I use win7 pro, but it happened on vista. My dell suspends quickly and flawlessly, but would rather use the t500. But my T500 takes a long time even when it does work, then eventually stops suspending altogether. I think all sw is up to date. I generally do not run the CCC nor the thinkpad power manager, but instead rely upon the windows tools.

Any ideas on what to try?

Thanks!

[Colonel O'Neill]

Is your switchable drivers up to date? Compare all your drivers against the T500 driver matrix and see if any are missing. Also try reinstalling the Power Management driver; this one is an absolute necessity.

[atomz4peace]

Thanks for the advice. I updated the ATI drivers about 2 weeks ago, so it shows current on ATI's site and using the TV system update.

For power mgmt, a while ago it seemed to help when I removed the TV power mgmt tool and just went with the windoze default. The drivers are still installed, v1.60.0.4, so it's a year old. The release notes claim no bug fixes but I'll upgrade anyway. Were you thinking of the TV power mgmt tool, or just the drivers?

I also saw this one show up on the TV system update regarding stops with suspends so we'll see on that too: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975599

Thanks!
Jim

[comps]

I've encountered only one suspend-related (OS-independent) bug on my T500 - it sometimes (after several suspend/wakeup cycles) fails to register a suspend ACPI event. I need to send hibernate (Fn+F12) first (which does nothing, since I don't use hibernation) to make Fn+F4 combination work again.
Aside from that, I haven't noticed any suspend/wakeup problems on any graphic card (intel - Linux / ATI - Windows).

Try updating BIOS as well.