ToSleep or not to ...

[jfsmith]

After a hard drive catastrophe in my trusty old R50E (1842-SVU), i installed a new 320 Mb drive and loaded a fresh (non-IBM or Lenovo) Windows XP Professional. After the full installation and downloading and installing all the applicable R50E drivers from Lenovo, everything works fine, with two exceptions:

1. Problem One: The machine will not suspend/hibernate. The Windows "Power Options" folder does not show hibernation as available and shows "do nothng" as the only option when closing the lid. The Lenovo "Battery Maximizer" software says all the right stuff, even lets to "enable hibernation", but it doesn't take. Suggestions"

2. Problem Two: My PCMCIA memory card which worked nicely in the previous lifetime of the R50E is not recognized. I reinstalled the Texas Instrument pcmcia.sys to no avail. The Lenovo PCMCIA download site says that PCMCIA support is supplied by the operating system.

I've been assuming it's not a BIOS issue, since the original BIOS supported both functions without problem.

[Neil]

Both problems are almost certainly driver issues. For sleep/hibernate to work, you need to install the Intel graphics driver. The other issue will probably be fixed by installing the chipset driver. You might need a few other things also. Easiest way to get all this is install Microsoft's dotnet framework and Lenovo's System Update 3.14, then let it do it's magic finding and installing drivers.

[jfsmith]

Thank you very much! The Intel graphics driver fixed the hibernation problem. I still have the PCMCIA problem, updating the chipset drivers didn't help. However, that's only a minor nuisance and I'll get it sooner or later. I really missed the ability to hibernate -- nice to have that working.

[jfsmith]

To close this one out, problem #2 was resolved. It wasn't the driver after all, seems that my PNY CF memory card, which was working perfectly when the hard disk crashed, apparently died in it sleep or something.