Not going fully into standby or shutdown

I've had my E6400 for a couple of days now and at least 5-6 times if I've sent it into Stand-By, it will just remain in the blue "Preparing to Stand-by" screen and not actually go into stand-by. This is the same with Shut-down, it just gets stuck in the "Windows is preparing to Shut Down" screen and doesn't fully shutdown. In both cases, I have to hold down the power button to force a shutdown. I've waiting 15 minutes sometimes to get it to go into standby or shutdown and neither happens.

I'm running it on 32-bit XP Professional.

Any thoughts on what could be causing this.

**UPDATE: I just try to put it into Hibernate, and the same thing occurred. I just had to hold the power button down to shut it down.

**Tried to put it into hibernate again and waiting 5 minutes before finally forcing it off.

 

There are a couple of things that can cause this problem.

The one that comes to mind is the webcam driver. Disable the webcam in Device Manager and see if that fixes the problem. My work-around is to use an old version of the driver, but I think the problem lies with one of the power management options.

John

 

Thanks. I disabled Dell Control Point from starting up, should I reenable it?

I'll try the webcam driver as well. But is this a E6400 specific problem? Right now, it is set to the power management setting of "Always On". Should it be set to Laptop/portable again?

 

So the webcam disabling trick worked.

Thanks for that, but that's a little annoying.

 

Dell Control Point has its uses. Reenable it when you are confident about everything else.

Find an older driver (pre-March 09, IIRC, and install it). That's what I'm using.

John

 

I wonder if Dell is aware of this issue.

 

I had a different issue today. What happened was that I would get to the user login screen and when I put in my password it would go to a black screen with just the cursor present. I rebooted and tried multiple times and the same thing.

Finally, I think it could have been the scandisk at boot or the fact that I changed the power regime, but I was able to get it to normal. However the "Error Checking" tool that I used took nearly 40 minutes to complete. Is that normal? It was stuck in the last 2 of the 5 steps for the longest.