On 7/11/2018 3:09 AM, VanguardLH wrote:
Steve wrote:

I am replying to my old post from May. Perhaps not a single person will
see it, but so be it.
Without doing anything else, my computer has been completely normal for
these last 6 weeks or so. I learned something about it today:
This computer has had off and on problems with insomnia since I got it
in the early Windows 7 days. I always put it in sleep mode when I was
ready for bed myself. Sometimes it would work for several days, then
start waking back up right away. That night I would turn it off and it
might be good again for several days.
What I have been doing is shutting it down completely every night. It's
been working fine all this time. I noticed recently it went into sleep
mode by itself and stayed there, so last night I did sleep mode for the
first time in weeks. Today the old trouble is back. Some sites are
unusable right now. I shut the computer off for a few hours this
afternoon, but that didn't help.
Right now, I'm thinking the whole problem is related to the faulty sleep
mode. If I just never use it, I'm thinking it might be all good again.

Disable all low- and off-power modes: don't use any sleep mode, don't
use hibernate nor hybrid hibernate (aka hybrid sleep). Also make sure
to disable fast startup mode. Test for several weeks. If the system
remained stable, just use hibernate mode for awhile (or get an SSD and
you won't care about boot startup time versus hibernate startup time).

If the problem goes away but comes back after reenabling one of the
power-saving modes, go into Device Manager to find which devices have a
Power Management tab when you look at their properties. Disable the
option to allow the OS to put the device to sleep.

I had a device (magicJack) whose driver interferred with sleep mode.
When the computer went into sleep, this driver prevented coming out of
sleep hence the computer was hung. I don't remember if I disabled its
power management or if that was one of the reasons I got rid of their
USB dongle and eradicated its driver from my Windows setup. Supposedly
a later chip version and a later driver fixed the problem but they
wouldn't dole out a new USB dongle unless the old one was broken, would
only replace it under warranty and would only allow a single warranteed
replacement (if the original burned up due to overheating from bad
design and was replaced, they wouldn't dole out a 3rd one even if the
2nd one went bad, too).

If you computer is waking up without user input, check events in Task
Manager. Some may be configured to wake the computer when the event is
scheduled to run. Some programs don't use the Task Scheduler to run
their scheduled events. Backup programs are notorious for using their
own scheduler process. Instead of using Task Scheduler with all of its
options, they instead use a simpleton scheduler ran as a process that is
only usable by their backup program, so check what processes you leave
running that may act as a scheduler. Also look in the BIOS for alarm
settings that will wake the computer (wake at a time, wake on LAN, wake
on whatever).

Thanks for finding my follow up to an old post and thanks for the very
helpful answer.
In a way, I've already been testing not using sleep mode and it's been
perfectly stable. Only when I purposely used sleep mode did it mess up
again. I have it set to sleep after 5 hours. Once I turn it off at
night, then on in the morning, I generally don't leave it alone for 5
hours all day. I leave the computer on, on Saturday night because I have
a scheduled backup every Sunday at 2 AM. I didn't check it today until
afternoon and, after the backup, it had time to go to sleep mode on its
own. I had to shut it off for a few hours before it was usable. I'll
change the settings so it never sleeps on its own.
I'll check into the other things you mentioned. It also crossed my mind
that I haven't opened the case in, probably, 3 years or more. I should
probably check for dust bunnies.

Steve