T42 hangs on standby/hibernate when on battery

[dr_st]

My T42 has developed this problem.

Whenever it is running on battery, I cannot go into standby or hibernate. If I try, it starts the process, says "Preparing to standby/hibernate..." and then it freezes. The power and battery LEDs stay on, the laptop stays on (you can hear it), but the screen is blank, and it won't respond to anything except a forced shutdown (holding the power button down for several seconds).

Sometimes the screen doesn't stay blank, but somehow goes crazy with random blinking black&white ripples (similar to a TV "snow" effect), until I turn it off.

It only happens when running on battery outside of a dock. When running on AC, or when docked (even if the AC is not connected to the dock), it works fine.

I'm suspecting the power management schemes are somehow off. It should be known that the current OS was not loaded from the hidden partition, but installed manually, as were all the drivers. Also, it is running the Thinkvantage Power Manager (which isn't supported officially on the T42).

Anyone familiar with the issue/symptoms? What would be the first thing to try? Preferably, I would like to keep the Power Manager, cause I find it more convenient and powerful than the old Battery Maximizer.

[davidspalding]

I've had very similar issues, and they started after I'd replaced the ATI video drivers with Omega third party drivers a year or two ago. My workaround (if you call it that) was to log out, THEN hibernate. Standby still didnt' work, it seemed to suspend by all right, but when I resumed, Windows reinitiated a new suspend action that would hang for a very very long time. Bah, humbug. Hibernate was sufficient for my needs anyway.

I recently reverted to the 10/2005 ATI drivers that my T43 shipped with (to remedy a separate issue), and tried again. Hibernate worked from a logged in session, but not suspend.

I can't offer you much of a fix, other than trying logging out of your session then suspending or hibernating.

Also of note: I use a power-on password, and have the Fingerprint Software using my user's fingerprint as the power-on password replacement. So on normal boot, the fingerswipe logs me in. Well, also on resume from hibernation, the finger swipe (which I set to be required on resume) will resume from hibernation, and then log me in, even if I hibernated from a login prompt. Handy, that. YMMV. HTH.

[dr_st]

Hmm... I also have the Omega drivers. I would not have suspected them, but I guess it is possible.

Thanks for the tip. I will try to play with the video drivers a bit.

[davidspalding]

I just confirmed with the 1YD170WW ATI drivers (v 8.362-070405a-050146C), I can hibernate fine from a login session, which was problematic before.

You can find the location of those online in the "desktop icons rearrange" thread.

[dr_st]

Well, your suggestion did the trick. Thank you very much!

This is why I love the forums - the richness of the collective Thinkpad user experience can help one solve even the weirdest, most unlikely problems.

For the record, The ATI drivers in the thread you sent me to did not help, in fact they wouldn't even install from some reason, claiming that no compatible video hardware was found.

But I installed a different (newer) version of the Omega drivers and now I can go into standby/hibernation on battery as well.

Thanks again!