W5F sleep problem/question

well i bought myself an ASUS W5F just today, although i'm not 100% settled on it yet. i have 7 days to return it, with no restocking fee or anything. i will write more thoughts on it soon. however:

earlier today i closed the laptop to put it to sleep. then i carried it around in my backpack for a few hours. when i pulled the laptop out later, it was very warm, as though it had been running. i opened it, it woke up, and the battery was all the way down to 35%.

my guess is either (a) it didn't sleep after all; or (b) it slept, but woke itself up in my backpack (due to motion?), maybe very often.

this never happened with my thinkpad. i don't know if this is an issue with my particular unit, or with W5Fs, or if this is a common issue with other laptops too.

 

Are you 100% sure it was fully slept?

Also, check the power options in the Control Panel.

It won't wake up due to motion, so thats not it.

 

i guess i'm not 100% sure it was fully slept. what kinds of things can prevent it from sleeping if i close it?

thanks

 

ok, i just witnessed the W5F waking up while it was closed.

i closed the laptop and it went to sleep (blue power light pulsating). it was sitting on my desk, not moving or anything. wifi was off, ethernet cable unplugged. bluetooth on, but no other bluetooth device in my entire house, except for the mouse which was turned off.

about 10 minutes later i was surprised to hear a wakeup chime from the asus. i looked over and sure enough, the power light was solid and the HD light was flashing. i opened it up, it was on. i have no idea why.

this is not ideal at all. as a workaround, i can use hibernate instead, but i prefer just being able to sleep (it's faster than hibernation).

 

Have you installed the wireless console util? Generally this was required in the past to wake up. You have a somewhat different issue here. Have you changed any setting for wake up lan? bios? messed with windows settings? Tweak anything?

 

It could be wake-on-lan as well...

 

a brief update on this situation:

when i witnessed my laptop waking up while it was on my desk, it was because it was waking itself up to hibernate, thanks to the power settings set by power4gear (hibernate after X minutes, etc). so that explains that incident.

i did some more brief experimenting. sometimes when i close the W5F, it doesn't seem to actually sleep? the display goes off, the hard drive and fan spins down, and all the lights go off except for the power light. however, the power light stays on, steady-- it doesn't go into the slow pulsating mode that indicates sleep. i'll wait and wait and the light doesn't go into sleep mode. when the laptop is in that state, if the lid opens even slightly, the computer will wake up. i think this must be what was happening in my bag. i'd close the computer, it wouldn't actually sleep, and a jostle may have woken it up.

however, if i manually put the machine to sleep (using a hotkey or the shutdown menu), and then close the lid, the power light pulsates as expected. lifting the lid does not wake it, even if i open it all the way. i have to hit a key to resume from sleep. at least that's what happened the last time i tried it.

now, i haven't done any real rigourous testing-- these are just observations from a few quick experiments. i don't know if these results are consistent, and i haven't checked to see if the behaviour is affected by power4gear modes or anything else.

in any case, it's not a huge deal, i've just been using hibernate instead.

 

Don't think that you are crazy. Mine does the same thing. It has happened twice and I just got it a week ago. Today I closed it and went off to make dinner. I then heard it singing to me. It was playing that stupid ASUS commercial on it. It was singing that last time too. I have to find that thing and delete it - I think it may be the screen saver or something. It drives me nuts! I also noticed that my battery was much lower tonight when I went to use it. I don't think that it fully goes to sleep when you close the lid. I haven't had it long enough to figure it all out yet!

 

When you close the lid it goes to stanby. Standby does draw electric. Use hibernate instead. Change the option in control panel power option.

 

i realize that there is a difference between standby and hibernate. if you read my post carefully (and i apologize if it's unclear), when i close the lid, it does not do the same thing as if i choose 'standby' from the power off menu. (when i use the term 'sleep', i mean 'standby'.)

the scenarios:
- laptop is on. i use the hotkey or the 'turn off computer' standby option to put the w5f into standby. result: display goes off, hd spins down, power light slowly pulsates. yes, i know it is still drawing power.
- laptop is on. i close the lid. result: drive spins down, display goes off, but the power light stays steady. it does not pulsate. it doesn't seem to be in actual standby mode at all. slight jostles will cause the laptop's hd to spin up, sounds will play, etc.

 

After doing a complete reinstall of my W5F system, I notice that mine does the same thing you describe above. Bunnyhero, did you ever find a solution to this problem besides hibernating?

I just uninstalled Power4 Gear hoping that that would solve the problem. It's annoying to have to put my computer to sleep using a menu instead of just being able to close the lid.

 

I had something similar for a while. When I activated bluetooth (the as-delivered state is without the bluetooth stack installed), the machine crashed, and then started resuming itself from standby.

So, my first thought was it was some sort of option in bluetooth (resume to host to report on a new device in range or something), but I couldn't find anything in the driver settings that would do that. I had a hunt around for anything else, and found the modem was set to bring the PC out of standby. It wasn't plugged in, but I disabled it anyway, and haven't seen it resume itself since.

Separately, I also found that disabling the bluetooth device (using the system tray icon to turn bluetooth off but leave WLAN enabled) led to the PC hanging apparently somewhat at random. Leaving BT enabled seems to be OK.
As an aside, its possible to change your settings (control panel->power options->advanced) for what to do when closing the lid.

 

i thought i posted a reply to this already but i guess i only previewed it. heh.

no, i'm still having the same issue. i've just gotten used to hitting Fn+F1 (sleep) before closing the lid. i've also changed the lid-closing action to hibernate, so that if someone else is using it and they just close it, at least it won't randomly wake up again.

 

It is possible that all these machines have power management soft issue due to the way windows is installed. It seems that formatting and reinstalling from a single partition on the w3j fixes the issues. I imagine it can be the same for the w5

 

thanks for the tip! at the moment, i doubt i'll have time to reformat and reinstall everything (in the middle of a couple of projects), but i will likely try that out at some point. meanwhile, i can live with it...

 

Nope, I reformatted and installed in a single partition and it still wakes up.

I do F1 too, but just now it woke up again after closing the lid and watching it go to sleep.

My Power Options is set to sleep when lid is closed. I'll try your hibernate suggestion, but everyone universally hates hibernating, me included.

BTW, my Bluetooth is usually disabled, but I can't see what that has to do with it.

This is a bad bug, I hope Asus is LISTENING!!!!!! Albert Chung??? I'm not making this up!!!

 

I have solved the standby/hibernate problem in my W3J.
Please read my post yesterday entitled "I found what
caused standby/hibernate problem...".

My computer does not really went to standby either as the hard drive have some activity.

The solution was very simple and does not require you to
load XP again. I hope the solution works in W5F as well.

 

thanks for the suggestion. unfortunately, it doesn't make a difference for my W5F.

it did occur to me, however, that if the W5F had a latch to hold the screen closed, this issue might be less of a problem, since the computer wouldn't wake up so easily in my backpack (the lid wouldn't move around so much). on the other hand, a latch wouldn't help with the situations where the laptop spontaneously wakes up even when sitting on a desk.

 

I formatted/ installed XP Pro on receipt of my W5F and after having some similar problems with sleep / lots of locking up, especially at shutdown - I upgraded my bluetooth manager to the latest vers. and also upgraded my Bios to 204. The bios upgrade seems to have mostly helped - still wakes up now and then (and gets really hot in my backpack!), but I'm tempted to think this might be due to the lack of a latch - I'd trade my camera in for a latch! One thing I have noticed is that after going to BIOS v. 204, the blue light on the outside no longer blinks when the laptop enters standby - it just stays solid. Not a big deal, but has anyone else observed this?

 

my power light only blinks if i use the hotkey or menu to put my notebook into standby. if i close the lid it doesn't. yeah, i think i would trade the camera for a latch, too... maybe i'll wrap my W5F in a rubber band

 

I believe I've roughly worked out what causes my W5F to trip out of standby - its down to the use of the bluetooth mouse. Just in case anyone else has a similar cause, heres the details of mine:

I've used the notebook with bluetooth enabled, but not using the external bluetooth mouse (the one that comes with the notebook) for a while now - thats fine, the machine will reliably go into standby and stay there.

One day, I used the bluetooth mouse for a while, then turned it off and packed it away. After that, the Asus would only stay in standby for a few minutes before turning itself back on and then just sitting there powered up. It did that twice in a row before I gave up and just hibernated it instead.

What I didn't do, apart from turning off the mouse, was anything to disable bluetooth. I left the controller enabled (both on the switch, wireless console, and the driver-level enable); I left the mouse pairing established. To be honest, fiddling around with any of those is not really viable - its not that its hard so much, its just going to be forgotten. And when I did that before, the entire machine would hang a little while after disabling bluetooth (although I upgraded the bluetooth drivers since, so maybe thats fixed now).

I'm not really very bothered about all that though (albeit curious) - hibernate is decently quick on the W5F, its reliable (whereas standby is deliberately easy to pull out of), but most of all, its effectively zero-power.

 

that's very interesting! i activated my bluetooth mouse as soon as i opened the box

 

Has anyone solved this problem? Mine will not go to sleep reliably, without it waking up if you don't close the lid too early. I just intalled the new Intel Wi-Fi drivers, because once I caught it saying "Intel control panel will not allow computer to go sleep, please update your driver." Will report back findings.

Also, on my latest business trip, the W5F suddently experienced Wi-Fi problems, like needing the hardware switch to be toggled each time it wakes up. Started after I installed some Dutch software to connect at a family member's house (which did not work and I had to uninstall it)! :^(

 

Yes, installing the new Intel driver solved that problem, but the unit still insists on waking up when I close the lid, oh well.

 

Mods - If you think this should be the start of a new thread - please move it or PM me and I will create a new thread.

I am having similiar trouble iwth my V6j. I can use standby with no trouble at all, but the computer can not hibernate reliably, so if I put the computer in standby it will always wake back up because it tries to go into hibernation. I have tried checking the system logs on my computer after a failed hibernation, there is nothing that indicates a problem. The only thing that shows up is when the wireless card attempts to get an address. I have checked the wake on lan settings, they should be set so the wireless card can't bring the computer out of sleep mode. What can I do to make hibernate work?

 

Caleb:
I disabled my hibernate, but it does this anyway. There's definitely some type of interaction and I agree we should start a new thread on this!

 

The w3j had problems, the w5F had problems, the V6j had problems, I am wondering if there is a common asus driver in play here. I am really curious if bluetooth is involved, but I can't eliminate that because it always turns on when I start the computer, so it will always interfere.

 

Wow! So it's a prevalent problem! And because we use a system of "owner's lounges," you need to check them all to see what machines are suffering from the same affliction.

So, let's keep this thread alive and see who else chimes in with a possible solution. One thing I did notice is that you need to close the lid after putting the W5F to sleep and watching the blue light begin to do its "sleep flash." If you close it anytime before, it wakes up again, unless you're lucky of course.

 

Well, I think I know what is wrong with my V6j. Its kinda wierd though. This summer I upgraded to 2GB of RAM (from 1GB). I had no problems until about a month to 6 weeks after the upgrade. Then the computer was getting flaky (really annoying because that was the start of school). Then 2 weeks later I had to do a complte reinstall of windows. After that, hibernation didn't even work. Last night I took out the second stick of RAM, hibernation works perfectly. I put it back in, hibernation stops working right. So a little googling reveals a microsoft patch desigend for systems with more than 1GB of RAM and trying to hibernate ( http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=909095). I don't know 100% if it is working right, but I at least know the source of the problem now, so it is 10x easier to fix.

 

ugh. so i've been doing that same ritual for awhile now (making sure the blue light sleep flashes before closing lid), and it was working great, but tonight, my laptop started waking up in my backpack again. i'm not sure what changed.

wait... maybe it's waking up to hibernate again. i think i might have reset one of the power4gear profiles to its default setting. anyway, disabling that hibernate to see if it makes a difference. frustrating!

and cabelschmerge, i will check out that microsoft patch, since my w5f has 1.5 GB of ram. thanks!

EDIT: oh, i have that patch already. i think i remember installing it shortly after upgrading my RAM.

 

Same situation here. No solution and putting the W5F to sleep reliably is a pain in the ass!

 

Hey guys, the best I've achieved so far is a compromise between hibernate and standby. I dont know if someone has already mentioned this, but if you go to the "Advanced" tab in the Power Options Properties for XP, you can set your power button to "Hibernate" and if you go into "Power Schemes", you can set "System Hibernates" to "Never".

That way, whenever you sleep your laptop (Manually Fn + F1), it never comes back on until you open it again and hit the power button because Hibernate is almost disabled (its never supposed to be triggered). If you want to hibernate your laptop, you can always just hit the power button now and make it hibernate.

This is the most comfortable compromise I have found so far... I'd still rather not have to compromise at all, so keep experimenting guys !

So I guess we've narrowed it down to a conflict between the way the W5F understands the hibernate and standby settings.

 

Fuge, that doesn't many sense. There is no option for "Hibernate" for pressing the Power button.

 

has anyone tried installing the newest BIOS (v 304) for the W5F from the asus download page? i'm going to try it. i'm curious because the terse and uninformative notes there mention "Fixed: Timeout 1 Min S3 and 2 Min S4. Test Fail.". if "s3" and "s4" refer to various sleep modes, i wonder if this might fix our little problem. i'll report back.

 

OK, I downloaded it too, but waiting for you to find out!

 

ok, i haven't done any rigourous tests yet, but so far so good!

under advanced power options, i set the action for "when i close the lid" to "stand by".

then i closed the lid. after a few seconds, all the status lights turned off, except for the blue power light, which went into the slow pulsating mode! it's never done that before when closing the lid.

i wasn't patient enough to wait any longer to see if it woke up by itself. instead i opened the lid. the computer remained asleep, until i hit a key on the keyboard (which is fine by me, considering that there's no latch).

again, this is only an initial report. more info as i do more tests, like closing the lid and carrying it around in my backpack, etc. but not tonight-- i need to get some sleep

 

bump and update:

so far, it seems that version 304 of the BIOS has solved the close-lid-to-sleep problem for me! closing the lid now puts the laptop in standby mode properly, just the same as if i had hit the Fn-F1 combo first. it does take a few seconds, but it works: it does not wake itself up minutes later, nor does it wake itself up while carrying it around in my backpack. opening the laptop does not wake it up, but that is just fine with me, i don't mind tapping the space bar or whatever to revive it.

huzzah! finally!

 

Oh yea? How do you update the bios again? I seem to remember running a program.

The Asus site is so slow in trying to get an answer!!!

 

Totally fixed! I did it twice and it was two for two! Woohoo!

 

thanks for the update and confirmation on the fix
was a little worried about the problem since im considering buying the notebook soon

 

It's great to have such an annoying little problem fixed!