Windows 7 x64 impossible S3 sleep (2 Viewers)

joz

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Hi all,

I really wanna stay with Windows 7 x64 cause I think it has a lot of good pointers across the whole thing but I cannot for the life of me get S3 sleep working on multiple machines.
Now I know that MS has rewritten this part for the sake of performance so I guess that it's just prone to be buggy because of the rewrite.
But anyways my issue is that entering standby is no problem at all but resuming from standby is another matter. The system will startup everything like fans, hds etc except the screen will remain in a sleep state (so it never receives a signal).
I have tried MCE standby tool and that bit of software actually is really great and solved my desktop's (also win 7) sleep problem but that was something diff. (didnt wanna enter sleep because of realtek onboard audio cr*p).

I'm getting to a point I do not know what to do. There are no pointers what so ever in windows even viewer what's causing all this. The weird thing is that it's incosistent as heck too. I've had it working couple of times but now it just doesn't. So when it stopped working I decided to try a reinstall but then it started happening directly from the start. Well I did install ati vid drivers and some updates but not much more.

Standby always worked beatifully on XP, no probs whatsoever. I skipped vista for the HTPC so I do not have any experience with that one on this machine. I have turned the internet upside down and found several causes;
1) My vertex, heard people reporting that they had issues with the vertex and earlier Win 7 (beta) builds
2) Software settings inside windows. I already tried fiddling with a lot of power settings and disabled stuff like windows defender (reported by some to be the cause and the fix)
3) Believe me or not but even the CMOS battery can be the cause according to some. But I guess that only applies to hybrid sleep, I use pure S3 only
4) I have a couple of Samsung F drives in there, they take a while to spinup. Might take too long for windows, so windows tries to access these drives too soon? I do have windows set to store stuff like the pagefile and temp files on a seperate HD instead of the vertex.

If you guys have anything more for me to try please feel free to post cause I'm getting kinda clueless here.
 

joz

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March 17, 2008
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Nope it's not that, the PC is totally unresponsive when it happens. No way to login thru Remote desktop or anything either. It just freezes completely.
But :D for thinking with me here.
 

usualsuspect

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May 12, 2009
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another idea is an activated "away mode"
but if this was the case, the powerbutton should wake the system...
So when it stopped working I decided to try a reinstall but then it started happening directly from the start. Well I did install ati vid drivers and some updates but not much more.
so the same issue in a totally fresh system?
4) I have a couple of Samsung F drives in there, they take a while to spinup. Might take too long for windows, so windows tries to access these drives too soon? I do have windows set to store stuff like the pagefile and temp files on a seperate HD instead of the vertex.
I do not believe that the spin up is too slow. but you could try re-installing on another hdd to be sure...

I don't have too much experience with 64bit windows, but the few I made with vista64 are not too positive. so I fear that it may be driver related... try to remove/disable as much hardware as possible
most probably you already had this idea but "'I'm getting kinda clueless here", too.
 

joz

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March 17, 2008
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Yeah the same issue on a fresh system. The weird thing is that when I was installing the first time around I was checking to see if S3 works and I did have a couple succesful cycles but ever since that it's a no go. Even not with a fresh reinstall. It might actaully be one of the updates that causes it but that's just a shot in the dark.

Yeah I know I should be trying it with a minimum setup. But I kinda feel reluctant to do that because the hardware in there needs to stay in there. I guess I'll be moving back to good ol' XP soon... Just bought 4GB of RAM 2nd hand to put in the system so I can use a large RAMDrive but I guess that won't go... XP x64 works beatifully but MP is not supported.
 

joz

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I know about PAE (Physical Address Expansion or something) but I have searched my award bios up and down and I can't see any setting for it at all.
I thought PAE also was a bit problematic somehow and mainly intended for servers (and there respective OS's)

----EDIT----

omg, omg. I was looking in totally the wrong parts, this is weird man but I think I solved it (just had one successful cycle maybe jumping the wagon here).
I had to disable spread spectrum which is really really weird since it's supposed to make it more stable (when not overclocking that is, which I am, not overclocking that is). I always had this on in XP. I tested my XP 32 bit install with 8GB of RAM (which I upgraded too) and that worked, also with spread spectrum on.

----EDIT2----
spoke too soon. It worked the one time (short sleep test) but did not the second. I guess it's a combination of software and specifics to the hardware.
 

usualsuspect

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I did not believe that there is a bios setting but google teached me. should be "memory remapping". but I am still not sure, if it's really necessary when using a ramdisk.

my laptop doesn't have any setting here, but I am quite sure, that PAE was activated with xp32. (starting from xp sp2 pae should be enabled by default. you can check at system properties.)

I did not find an evidence, why pae should be problematic. but mainly positive states on xp32 + ramdisk.
so maybe it's worth a try...

the german thread is quite interesting. is it ok for you? otherwise I could try to extract the most important things and translate...

EDIT:
maybe it's ram-related? have you already installed the new ram?
did you check the ram?
 

joz

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March 17, 2008
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Well although I'm dutch my german's quite bad. I'll try and read thru it but I think I'm on to something here.
I'm thinking it's a combination of the new sleep code of win 7 and some of my bios settings.
I already have had a couple succesfull (short) cycles now after tweaking some stuff;

1) Disabling spread spectrum seemed to help a little. I have been testing sleep a lot of times (not working like 20 times) and after doing this I had one succesful cycle but not with a long sleep
2) Not relying on SPD values! I have set the CAS latencies myself.
3) I have set this to disabled although I'm not sure what it does "Auto disable DRAM/PCI frequency"
 

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