Help! Win XP - Standby option greyed in shutdown, missing from Power Options.

[Harvey]

My laptop used to be set to go into Standby when I closed the lid. Now, suddenly, it just stays on, and the "Standby" option is greyed and non-operational when shutting down the machine. Also, now, both "Standby" and "Hybernate" options are missing from Power Options in Control Panel.

Win XP Pro, SP3. Further info - I did the registry mod that allows continued security updates by ID'ling the OS as Windows POS (Point Of Sale) version so could have been one of the updates, but I have no idea exactly what caused this.

TIA for any help.

 

[Ichinisan]

Maybe this will help to find out why ACPI fails?
http://support.microsoft.com/KB/907477

 

[postmortemIA]

looks like you lost a driver to one of devices, hence windows can't go to sleep... very common when you don't have video drivers

 

[Harvey]

Thanks for the replies, buthe problem is not that the machine has problems entering or exiting from Standby and Hybernate modes. They simply no longer exist, although they used to.

 

[ninaholic37]

How much Hard Drive space do you have? I think hibernate doesn't work if your hard drive space is less than your amount of RAM (wild guess).

 

[Ichinisan]

Thanks for the replies, buthe problem is not that the machine has problems entering or exiting from Standby and Hybernate modes. They simply no longer exist, although they used to.

Yeah. If Windows determines that something is not ACPI compliant, the option disappears.

Usually a missing driver causes that.

 

[Dahak]

Yeah. If Windows determines that something is not ACPI compliant, the option disappears.

Usually a missing driver causes that.

^^ as others said usually a missing driver and I have seen it be 85% of the time the video drivers

 

[Harvey]

I ended up fixing it by brute force. Fortunately, I clone my drive weekly, and I keep another clone over longer periods. I did my weekly clone to back up all of my current files. Then, I restored my drive from an earlier clone from a few weeks ago. When I rebooted, the Standby mode was working again, and all I had to do was copy my files from the newer clone and update my AV, anti-spyware, etc.

Then, I cloned the newly restored drive. Since I suspect the problem may have been caused by one of the Windows updates I did since the registry mod, I haven't yet redone the Windows Updates, which I will do one at a time, checking each time to see if it again breaks the Standby mode. If it does, I'll be clone backed up to just before the offending update and not re-install it.

Thanks to all who offered their suggestions.