Laptop not restarting or waking...

[andyoxon]

If one sleeps the laptop, then wakes it, or restarts, the screen back lights, then goes black, and repeat - the Dell logo does not appear.  The only way to boot is to long press the power button for shutdown, then on.  I've tried BIOS update, SFC / scannow, Dell driver updates, Glary scan, and disk check, with no joy.  Also removed battery, and held power button down. 

Any ideas?

[DaveJ]

Quite a lot of old machines don't wake from sleep consistently with Windows 10.

You can stop the machine going to sleep.  Its a trade off of the power required to keep it awake, versus the almost certainty that if you carry on having to power it off, at some point the OS will get corrupted and it won't restart.

[DaveReading]

My W10 Asus laptop occasionally suffers from the same problem.  Usually, holding down the power button for 4-5 seconds (i.e. not long enough to force a cold boot) resolves the situation (might need doing a couple of times).  It will then restart with everything than was open when I put it to sleep still running.

[Nick H.]

Reinstall W10. And/or use tools at bleepingcomputer.com. And/or search those fora where Windows admins hang out. Maybe it's a peculiarity of your vintage motherboard with W10?

[andyoxon]

Thanks all.

Have a rescue disk, but unfortunately on final Windows Office install - so would lose licence AFAIA.

I managed to find hibernation option, and set the lid closing to hibernate.  This works for some reason.  i.e. put in hibernation and press power button once, laptop boots through Dell logo.  Sleep & restart still not working, but I've turned off quick boot for shutdown in 'power management', so AFAIA the laptop now does a full boot with shutdown.

Ran Dell support assist - didn't do much.

Big Windows 10 install pending so will see if this fixes anything.  I suppose it could be hardware issue - not sure.

Update.  I watched it do a self-restart during the install of the Windows update.  Screen went blank for ~30 secs, then laptop restarted on it's own (with sound the same as when one does a single press of the power button).  Later when i had a go at manual restart, there was a brief error message about not being able to restart, and 'node' followed by a load of characters.  Not idea what that was about.

[Kim]

Hibernate doesn't require the hardware to do anything special, it's just the operating system saving and restoring its state before and after shutdown.  Suspend means the system has to enter a special low-power mode, and - more challengingly - restore itself from it correctly.  Easy for some driver or other to not play ball.

[Nick H.]

There ought to be a way to reinstall Windows without losing your Office licence. It's such a fundamental maintenance task...being unable to do it is quite a weakness.

[Jaded]

Can you sign out of office, or deregister it, before reinstalling Windows?

[mrcharly-YHT]

I've seen this problem happen when Windows is trying to do updates in the background. The OS just can't recover from 'sleep' mode when it is in the middle of updating system files.

[Nick H.]

After your imminent Windows update you could try the Tweaking toolkit thing https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/windows-repair-all-in-one/ It can't do any harm. I've been using it for years. Never quite sure what it's up to. It may be as useless as so many of these free tools are, but there's no risk and it doesn't try to strongarm you into buying extra shit. Bleepingcomputer is a safe source.

[andyoxon]

Thanks all.

Did a (Fn key + Power button) "ePSA Pre-boot System Assessment" thorough system scan - it only picked that the battery was 'reaching end of usable life'. 

Mysteriously the laptop now restarts & sleeps Ok       Maybe the Win10 update actually did something, after a couple re-boots.

The node.exe error (appeared again) turns out to relate to something in Adobe Creative Suite not being able to load - googled it.

[andyoxon]

I've seen this problem happen when Windows is trying to do updates in the background. The OS just can't recover from 'sleep' mode when it is in the middle of updating system files.

Maybe this was it.

[DaveReading]

I've seen this problem happen when Windows is trying to do updates in the background. The OS just can't recover from 'sleep' mode when it is in the middle of updating system files.

I would never advise allowing Windows to install updates in the background.

[Lightning Phil]

I've seen this problem happen when Windows is trying to do updates in the background. The OS just can't recover from 'sleep' mode when it is in the middle of updating system files.

I would never advise allowing Windows to install updates in the background.

Try stopping W10!