Thinkpads Forum

I've had a W500 for a while, has been working fine for 4 years. However, in the past 3 months I've started to have consistent issues with the system failing to enter sleep mode properly, and failing to recover from hibernate.

Basically, if I boot the system and immediately close the lid, it will enter sleep mode correctly, and wake up again when the lid is open.

However, if I do some activity (eg. web browsing, etc) and then close the lid, the system does not enter sleep mode. If I open the lid, the screen is black, and the disk activity light is flickering. Nothing I do will bring the screen display back, or get any response from the system.

I have also noticed that in the cases where the system does sleep, if I leave it for a while it will enter hibernation mode.

I've tried enabling and disabling hybrid sleep for the power plan, with no success.

All updates to the Power Manager software are current.

Anything else I should try?

The situation where it eventually enters hibernation is usually just a normal setting of the power scheme. Look under advanced settings, sleep, hibernate after.

I have never had this problem with a Thinkpad. I did have a very similar problem with an ancient Asus S5Ne, a 1st generation Centrino machine, running Windows XP, waking it from hibernation, not sleep. Before I gave it away, I regenned the system with a fresh install of XP on a different hard disk. The problem has not been noted since.

The disk is always a possibility. When it enters sleep mode, it writes the hibernation file at the same time. If the disk driver command que backs up due to drive failure at that time, something such as you relate could happen.



You didn't mention which OS. If Windows 7, see
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/15 ... ecker.html
This may also be available for Vista.

If you have a spare disk, you might try genning a newer OS. Windows 8 works on the W500. See the end of this thread:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 60#p692860

Thanks for that!

Updating the display drivers seems to have helped somewhat, I've had a few sleep/wake cycles without problems. Disabling hybrid sleep has also helped.

The system file checker did not find any issues.

I'm using an SSD for the system drive, which seems to be healthy.

Nope, no joy. This has relegated the system to being entirely useless.

Still having exactly the same behavior.

Closing the lid doesn't put the system to sleep (ie sleep light doesn't come on) but opening the lid again shows a black screen and a busy disk activity light. It never exits this state. It has to be shut down manually.

The system file checker shows no issues.

I have tried creating a new power plan from scratch, using both the Lenovo and Windows 7 utilities.

I note many posts from W520 owners having similar issues. Perhaps Lenovo introduced a problem in the power manager?

Have you tried uninstalling power manager to see if windows can manage sleep?

I think I might try that next, then will just go with a clean OS re-install.

mpcook wrote:Have you tried uninstalling power manager to see if windows can manage sleep?