Hi everyone,

I have some queries that I'm hoping someone that's been involved with this thread may be able to help with:

1) is it possible to have 2 different sleep timings? (MCE Standyby tool installed, sleep defined as 1min, and under user settings sleep while MCE is running, defined as1 hour)

2) Is there anyway of getting MCE to sleep immediately, so long as no recording etc taking place - currently it waits for the time above to be completed prior to going to sleep - currently it enters away mode first, then sleeps - unlike in mce05 where pressing sleep immediately goes to sleep.

Thanks
Tony

I'm not sure I understand entirely what you're asking, but it seems like something is set up wrong, when you press sleep it should sleep immediately after dumping to the HDD, this can take a while, mine for example takes a good 2 minutes to do this with hybrid sleep enabled. Because it doesn't just suspend to RAM, it also writes to the HDD.

Also, as the original creator of this thread, people may, or may not want to know that I now have all sleep/wake/recording etc functions working perfectly (it was quite some time ago I started this)

If anyone thinks they may benefit from my experience post here and I'll try help, but 1 point I'll add aas a basis is that I started with all new, all mainstream hardware (at the time) (as in my sig) so finding drivers has been no problem for any of said hardware.

Hi AliasNeo,

I wonder if that's what my MCE is doing - I'll time it tonight and see how long it takes to sleep, perhaps I'm just expecting STR (S3) functionality, I wasn't aware that the memory was dumped to hard disc on sleep.

Thanks
Tony

Timed the close, 52seconds, so I guess it must be dumping memory to disk - thanks!

 

No worries, that's pretty fast, much faster than my shutdown, but i guess I have more in RAM to dump.

 

Oh, and as a side note, if you are running any *cough*torrent*cough* programs, it may either not shutdown at all or take a long time because of the way such programs download to RAM before dumping to disk.

I have a strange problem with S3 with our new HTPC build.  Maybe someone here can help...

My signature, below, contains the system specs.

Basically S3 works 100% flawlessly about 90% of the time.  Currently I have it configured to enter away mode using the remote and to S3 suspend after 15 minutes of idle.  When it works, it sleeps and wakes exactly like it should.

Unfortunately once out of every 10 or so S3 suspends, instead of firing back up, the lights turn on, the fans turn on, the hard drives start to spin up, and then after about 1 second it suddenly shuts down.  After another 3 seconds it tries to start up again, but again it shuts down.  This continues forever, cycling on for about 1 second followed by 3 seconds of shut down.  I can imagine this must be very hard on the hard drives, but so far they've all (5) survived at least 10 hours of these power cycles.

Hitting the power button I can get it to stop cycling, but when I try to power it back on again, once again it goes into the attempt to start and then shut down cycle again.

The only way I can get the system to recover is not only to power off the power supply (or unplug it), but I have to leave the power completely shut down to the motherboard for at least 15-20 seconds.  After that the system powers back up flawlessly again.

Every time this happens a number of settings also get reset in the BIOS (memory timing and anything that might change the operating parameters of RAM, CPU, etc.).  I do have everything running at stock, specified speeds, but the memory has to be manually configured since it requires 1.9V instead of the default 1.8V.

If anyone could help me debug this I'd very much appreciate any help.  So far Gigabyte hasn't been able to offer any suggestions to fix the problem.  The only things I can think of are:

• PSU isn't able to handle the S3 resume power surge properly (it is a high quality Enermax PSU though and I'm fairly sure 485W should be enough power).  Wouldn't it stay off if the PSU was overloaded though and how would unplugging it for 15 seconds help?
• a bug in the BIOS in the way it handles the fail safe startup (to deal with potential poor overclocking settings - I'm not overclocking at all though)
• a hardware problem with the motherboard

Any other ideas and/or suggestions on what I could check?  Right now I have suspend/sleep disabled, but this is not what I wanted when I designed this new system.

You have answered your own question there mate.

 

Power cycling is very power hungry, and spinning up the hard drives takes the most power of them all, if you're trying to spin up 5 hard drives on anything less than a 600W+ PSU it's not going to like it.

I had the same problem with my 5 HDDs, drove me insane until i tried disconnecting some from the power, found out that the max current they were drawing at startup was way above what my PSU could handle. Got it swapped for a decent (expensive) PSU and all is great now.

Try it out and see how it goes, but seems a pretty open/shut case to me.

No Coughing required - the pc is purely dedicated to recording Coronation Street, Emmerdale and occasionally any programs I want to watch ;-)

Tony

AliasNeO:

You have answered your own question there mate.

Power cycling is very power hungry, and spinning up the hard drives takes the most power of them all, if you're trying to spin up 5 hard drives on anything less than a 600W+ PSU it's not going to like it.

I had the same problem with my 5 HDDs, drove me insane until i tried disconnecting some from the power, found out that the max current they were drawing at startup was way above what my PSU could handle. Got it swapped for a decent (expensive) PSU and all is great now.

Try it out and see how it goes, but seems a pretty open/shut case to me.

The PSU didn't make much sense to me because:

• This same PSU used to power my old, more power hungry Athlon XP 3200+ CPU (~110W vs 95W) and the much more power hungry X1950Pro AGP (110W vs current 70W) with the same hard drives.
• The system voltages are always well within spec (all are about 2% over voltage)
• The system never has any issues at all (it is absolutely 100% stable once running), except for this 10% of the time resume issue from S3 (which used to work fine with the old hardware too).

But after thinking this through (over and over) I decided to try a bigger PSU.  Early this morning I pulled out my modular Ultra 600W PSU and installed it.  Annoyingly the system just finished getting stuck with the same S3 resume problem (so I'm back on-line researching again).  I am using a bit of a hack to get all of the SATA drives powered up though (way too much powered off a single run from the PSU for the drives) so I'd like to get some new PSU cables (it is a modular PSU) and wire it up properly.  I suspect the problem won't go away even with the 600W properly wired up though.

Searching the web, this power cycling issue seems like a very common problem with P35 based 3rd party (not Intel) motherboards, including my P35-DS4.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/242759-30-trouble

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2854

http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=446828

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1216988

There are many, many more posts about this issue.  Late last night and today I must have read over 100 individual cases with this same sort of issue with P35 based motherboards.  Just like with the others, once my system decides to not boot, even powering it off for a long time and then back on with the front power switch, it still won't boot (if it was the PSU and the PSU has enough power to start the system cold (as it does), I would expect the problem to often go away after letting the system sit for a few minutes to let the caps in the PSU charge).  The only way to get it to come up is to disconnect the power to the motherboard (5VSB included) and after 15+ seconds trying it again - then it works 100% of the time.

It seems like the problem might be somehow related to RAM on most of these systems (some with the issue I found are even using both the same RAM and processor I am).  It seems to be some sort of glitch in the power up/POST cycle where the RAM is checked and the chipset gets something screwed up with communication and can't recover until all of the power is shut down for an extended period.  The bad news is most of the time the solution for others ended up being RMA'ing the motherboard or switching to another brand of RAM.  Quite often though, even the RMA'd motherboards had the same issue.  The whole problem/solution thing seems to be totally hit and miss.

BTW, it turns out this isn't just a Gigabyte issue.  The same problem seems to exist with Asus, Abit, MSI, Gigabyte, etc. - all with P35 chipsets.

I'm going to try the 600W PSU properly (ordering the cables now), but after my experiment today and reading about all the others with this issue, I really don't have much hope that this will fix it.

I'm almost more tempted to try experimenting with all of the voltage and RAM timing settings in the BIOS.  I'm only trying to get this thing to run at stock speeds, but maybe upping the voltage to the CPU, RAM, NB, SB, PCIe, or tweaking the RAM timing might make provide a solution.

That is insteresting, my ignorance in this matter comes from the fact that I am generally quite selective with the hardware I chose, as you can see from my specs I tend to go for proven harware that I have read only good things about.

It seems quite unfortunate that this chipset of yours has such incompatability with such a range of motherboards, I'm guessing it's a design flaw in the chipset itself.

As you would imagine, the way we're going these days, all this hybrid sleeping etc isn't quite as simple as it used to be, everything needs to run in a reduced power state, a certain way for a certain time, then you can come suddenly at any time and c hange this, switching it to full power mode expecting it to do it and do it now.

If these things aren't properly integrated or compatability tested we're going to get problems.

Of course, aside from the PSU thing all I can suggest is try another board with a different chipset.

Let me know how the PSU ets on with sorting out your modular cables. Mine is modular too and i had the problem when connecting too many to one rail.

 

 

Hi all, I also have a problem with my Vista and S3 and I'm almost desperate, have been searching the internet the last couple of days without luck. I hope I'm posting this in the right place.

My problem: Vista just won't automatically go to sleep (S3) anymore. This used to be no problem, but I had to reinstall Vista to have a clean system and now it just won't do it anymore. When I use the remote controll it goes to sleep fine, it also wakes up with the remote. When it is supposed to record a show, it wakes up perfectly, but it just won't go back to sleep afterwards.

powermanagement:

High performance -> Advanced settings:
Require password: No
Turn off hard disk after: Never
Wireless Adapter Settings: Maximum performance
Sleep after: 5 minutes
Allow Hybrid sleep: Off (tried both on/off)
Hybernate after: Never
USB selective suspend: Disabled (tried both settings)
Power button: Sleep
Sleep button: Sleep
Start menu button: Shut down
PCI Express link state: Off
Search and Indexing: High performance
Turn of display after: Never
Adaptive display setting: Off
Multimedia Settings: Allow the computer to sleep

I have tried the latest version of the Stand-by tool, without any luck, it just makes no difference at all. Tried all different settings.

Device manager:

Human Interface Devices:
HID-compliant consumer control device: don't allow to turn off this device (greyed out, can't change); Don't allow this device to wake the computer.
HID-compliant device (2x): don't allow to turn off this device (greyed out, can't change); Don't allow this device to wake the computer.

Keyboards:
HID Keyboard Device: don't allow to turn off this device (greyed out, can't change)
Yes, allow this device to wake the computer (My remote control)
Standard 101/102-key keyboard: don't allow to turn off this device (greyed out, can't change); Don't allow this device to wake the computer.

Mice and other poitning devices:
HID-compliant mouse (2x): don't allow to turn off this device (greyed out, can't change); Don't allow this device to wake the computer.

USB controllers:
USB Root Hub: Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power; Don't allow this device to wake the computer (greyed out, can't change).
 
My systemspecs are:

ASUS P4P8X motherboard
Pentium IV 3.2 GHz
1 GHz RAM
NVIDIA 7600GS 512 MB
Terratec Aureon 7.1 PCI
2 SATA HD's
Club3D ZAP-TV 1100 tunercard
Vista Home Premium 32bit
 
BIOS:

Suspend mode: S3 only
Request video on S3 resume: Yes
ACPI 2.0 support: Yes
ACPI APIC support: Enabled
BIOS --> AML ACPI table: Enabled
 
I have installed all latest official drivers, and all Microsoft updates. I also tried removing all my USB devices, still nothing. Sorry for this long post, but I wanted to inform you guys of everything :-). Thanks!

Vista will never sleep in high performance mode, you have to put it into balanced, when i want mine to do all the power save stuff i put it in balanced, then when i want performance i have to switch back, it's as simple as a click on the power save setting in the power management optin in the control panel though, i just shortcut to it.

Hi AliasNeO, thanks for your reply. It is not true though what you say. It has been working fine for me in High Performance mode. In the advanced settings of High Performance you can set the time for Windows to go to sleep, so it should be possible.

Hmm, in that case, I can't help you I'm afraid. It has never worked for me when in High Performance mode, even with the correct time set. It will always sleep with the fans running (S1?) and not goin into proper S3 sleep. The only way mine can be made to S3 sleep is in Balanced or Power Save, but I never use Balanced. I have it in Power Save all the time unless I need to run processor intensive apps.

Ok, I have solved the problem (partly) and wanted to let you know about it. It was something I wanted to try, but didn't have much faith into. But anyhow, it solved the problem:

I just deinstalled the VFD casedisplay software! Apparently that was what was preventing Vista to go to sleep.

The strange thing remains that why this was no problem in the past. I know this software is not designed for Vista, but it always worked.

Anyway, I have no display at the moment, but I prefer that than a Vista suffering from insomnia :-)

Anyone has an idea to get this display working without problems?