Hi.

Here's an odd one. My main cad machine, running windows XP, used to hibernate perfectly well, and didn't get rebooted for weeks on end. A few weeks ago it started exhibiting an odd fault, which is once resumed from hibernation, it will turn itself off abruptly seconds to minutes after fully restoring itself. The power led stays on, so the PSU hasn't completely shut down, but everything else is off.

To get it back you have to force it off with a held-down power button for a few seconds, after which it will reboot and work perfectly normally again. If powered up and shut down, rather than hibernated, it always works. Nothing seems to be logged in the event viewer, and there is never any message or warning beforehand. It just goes click and dies.

Also, I have just found, if you suspend it to ram, it does much the same thing once resumed.

Before I start disassembling everything (you wouldn't believe how many cables there are under the bench), does this sound like anything anyone else might have encountered? It may be the PSU, or some weird software thing. I don't think there's anything wrong with the machine itself, as under all other circumstances it works perfectly reliably (or at least as reliably as a windows box ever does). I'd rather not have to replace it, as I don't really have the cash at the moment anyway, and it is a pain to reinstall everything. Although, thanks to Acronis Trueimage, much less of a pain than it used to be. I can recommend this program to any windows-using people

pca

I would try running Memtest86+ http://www.memtest.org/ and test your hard drive. Did you install any software/drivers just before this started? Maybe one of the new windows updates caused this.

I would definitely assume "weird software thing", since it's Windows. To test, you could take the current hard drive out, replace it with another, load Windows on the new drive, and try hibernating and resuming. If it doesn't power down on its own, it's got to be a software thing. (Or a hard drive thing, I suppose, but that seems unlikely.)

Oh, by the way, I finally tracked down what was causing this. It appears to have been a corrupt hibernation or paged memory file. I deleted both, defragged the drive, and recreated both, and it's been fine ever since. Thanks to Rob S for the suggestion.

Pca