Acer Extensa 5510 - can't wake up from sleep

I have Acer Extensa with Vista SP2 installed and altought everything else works fine, I cannot wake up the machine from sleep. Fans run and lights glow but black screen. Only choice I have is to press power button 5 seconds to turn the machine off and then start again. Hibernate works fine

In Device Manager there are no problems with devices, all drivers are installed and loaded. I don't remember what the exact english name for it is, but under administrative tools logs there are nothing mentioned happening when the machine crashes, only after it has been booted again there is log by Kernel Power saying that the last shutdown was unintentional or something similar. I have tried many solutions found by Google but nothing seems to make difference.

Is it motherboar fault or what? The machine is incompatbile with Vista SP2 ?

 

Make sure all the drivers are up to date (as in really up to date- not just the same that are available on Acer website). It may be an issue with one of the devices not waking up from sleep.
It is a long shot though.

 

Yeah I have searched and updated everything. I have tried latest and first BIOS for this machine, no changes. I have tried suspend in Vista, Windows 7 and Ubuntu but it fails in all of them.

I'm beginning to think it is motherboard defect, altough, everything except sleep mode works perfectly.

 

If anything, it might be the way ACPI is implemented in the BIOS? That is always tricky and it can be hit and miss, depending on the vendor.

Here is a question to ask, has anyone else with a 5510 had it working properly with Vista?

If you've tried different BIOS versions with no luck, well here are a couple more ideas...

1) I might suspect a RAM issue, since sleep is also known as "Suspend to RAM". Might try swapping out the SODIMMs one at a time and see if that does anything.

2) Another data point from a different laptop. which may or may not help:

- My Extensa 5620 never did Sleep or Hibernate very well running Vista.
I think Hibernate worked OK (it was slow), but Sleep was never reliable to my memory. I don't remember using it much.

- When I switched to PC Linux OS (early 2009 version) everything seemed to work better. That distribution is loosely based on Mandriva, which seemed like the best fit for my system. I think all of the 5620 hardware, except the card reader, worked without any special effort on my part.

- When I moved to Windows 7 Home Premium (doing a clean install), everything seemed to work perfectly. Sleep, Hibernate, everything.

Don't think I even had to down any special drivers from Acer either, they were all built in to Win 7.

 

It would not be the first time Linux would work fine and Vista didn't, I once had Acer laptop which took ages to boot to Vista, I don't remember if I had some problems with suspend with that laptop also. However Ubuntu behaved differently, booting normally and after some configuring suspended without problems.

I have tried different ram without success. I did disassemble the laptop and inspected the motherboard, no visible signs of damage. I forgot to mention that after booting to Ubuntu, the laptop complained something about the battery and orange led started to blink, it did it couple times with Windows also but no it's green again and the battery holds charge for about an hour.


EDIT: After Googling around I found one suggestion about bad bios battery. If I understood correctly, in suspend / standby mode bios settings are stored in ram and the bios battery has something to do with. If the voltage of the battery is too low waking up will fail because bios settings are lost... does this sound reasonable? Hibernate would work because the machine is completedly restarted, loading bios settings again?


Too bad the battery on this laptop is not standard CR2032 but something else and it seems to be soldered in place or something, it can probably be removed but putting a new one back would require soldering.

 

Noticed that if I try standby with only the battery, the machine seems to shut down completedly. With charger, after I press the power button it starts to this black screen and after powering down and up it boots from the beginning. With battery it boots straight from bios.

It is starting to look like some kind of motherboard issue on motherboard.

 

I am not an expert on ACPI, but I do know it can be very tricky (and ACPI is what "Sleep/Hibernate" depends on).

The way it is implemented can vary widely. Apparently there was a lot of misinterpretation about how to implement it. The various hardware vendors, BIOS makers, Microsoft, Linux kernel developers, Intel and AMD (among others) didn't always work together smoothly.

I think in the last 4-5 years, the "spec" has stabilized and works more consistently. At least that's my experience.

ACPI - Advanced Configuration and Power Interface

And the issue you mentioned about a bad motherboard battery possibly affecting how ACPI works would not surprise me one bit.

 

This one is solved. Detaching and reattaching the bios battery did the trick and laptop was able to go and wake from sleep. It required complete disassembly. Very irritating that they could not design the battery to be easily reached and removed.