A7600U, DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE Issues

celawrencejr

A few months back, my ACER all-in-one (A7600U), if I remember correctly, shut itself down while I was actively using it.  I walked away from it for about an hour.  When I came back to it, it would not reboot.  I forget the exact error message, but it included words conveying that the last shutdown was improper and that it could not load unpacked memory or some such thing.  

 

I took the back off the all-in-one to try a few ideas that I read in advice forums including:

 

• Removing the CMOS battery or, similarly, disconnecting the CMOS battery connector, and
• Removing and resetting the memory sticks.

Neither of these efforts prevented failure to boot into Windows (8.1).  Later testing revealed that the memory and hard drive are good.

 

My understanding is that this machine is just a wee bit too old (vintage 2013) to include the e-recovery options at boot up (i.e., via a separate recovery partition on the HDD).  And, I'm foolish.  I never created restore disks, so I had to order these disks from ACER and wait for about a week or so for them to arrive.   Alas, the long-awaited restore disks didn't work as the recovery software provided two displayed restore options and both were grayed out.  Per some forum advice, I tried plugging the all-in-one's hard drive into another machine to run the restore software.  Unfortunately, the other machine's BIOS was too old (pre-UEFI BIOS) to support the restoration.  

 

I was about to give up trying to resurrect my A7600U all-in-one on my own.  My plan was to put it all back together and take it to a local repair shop.  However, on a whim, I reconnected the hard drive leaving it dangling off the back side of the machine, and powered it up.  The error message no longer appeared; and, after a long delay, the machine began to boot into Windows . . . at least partially.  I tried the reboot a few more times.  Eventually, the machine booted back up into Windows on regular basis.

 

HOWEVER, the machine was very slow and another ominous problem began to emerge:  DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE.  While trying to move the mouse to make menu or other selections, the machine would lock up and a blue screen would appear indicating DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE.  That was well over a month ago.

 

Since the onset of the DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE issues, I've done a system restore (from the HDD) and I have upgraded the OS from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1.  Windows 8 was pre-installed on this machine.  I encountered no significant issues while updating Windows 8 for the Windows 8.1 upgrade or during the upgrade to Windows 8.1.  In fact, each step seemed to make the machine operate more quickly and smoothly (e.g., no more ponderous and disobedient mouse!).  However, I was still getting occasional DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE errors and subsequent rebooting, especially during transitions to and from sleep mode or when using the mouse with a few applications open.

 

Researching DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE error, I learned that this error is usually the consequence of an obsolete or corrupt device driver or out-of-date BIOS.  Further, I read that this error or failure is, in rare instances (~ 5 per cent of the time), caused by a hardware issue (e.g., a mother board failure).  Of course, I'm hoping for a problematic device driver or BIOS issue.   Addressing the latter is scary given forum warnings about "bricking" the machine if failing to properly update the BIOS.  Given my experiences, I can easily imagine an interrupted update (e.g., cut power or Internet connection).  Currently, I'm in the mode of trying to update all the drivers identified as out-of-date.  I downloaded a few of the "free" driver analyzer / repair utilities.  Each of these tools did identify out-of-date drivers, but only one of these tools actually updated some of the out-of-date drivers (i.e., Driver Booster 4).  However, I'm still left with just over a handfull of drivers identified as needing to be updated.  I found some ACER or ACER-related sites that provide driver downloads, but, so far, I haven't had any significant success replacing device drivers with these downloads.

 

Of course, it's too late to make a long story short!  Anyway, my questions to the ACER community follow:

 

• HAS ANYONE EXPERIENCED SIMILAR ISSUES?  IF SO, WHAT IF ANY SOLUTIONS HAVE YOU FOUND?
• HAS ANYONE ELIMINATED THE DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE BY UPDATING REQUIRED DEVICE DRIVERS?  IF SO, HOW DID YOU IDENTIFY AND THEN UPDATE THESE DRIVERS?  DID YOU DO THIS MANUALLY?  DID YOU USE A SPECIAL DRIVER UPDATE UTILITY (e.g., DriverAssist, DriverToolkit, Driver Booster, etc.)?  WHICH UTILITIES?
• HAS ANYONE TRIED UPDATING THE UEFI BIOS?  IF SO, WHAT ISSUES, IF ANY, DID YOU ENCOUNTER?  IF YOU WERE SUCCESSFUL, WHAT DID YOU DO?
• HAS ANYONE HAD SUCCESS ELIMINATING THE DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE ERROR BY OTHER MEANS?  IF SO, PLEASE DESCRIBE YOUR APPROACH.  

Thanks in advance for any advice that you may offer.  

 

PS -  I'm a bit worried, beyond "bricking the machine" by a failed UEFI BIOS update, but I'm also worried about effectively doing the same thing by continuously incurring the DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE error.  I gather that that is a possibility.

 

BTW:  I'M ALSO INTERESTED TO LEARN WHETHER ANYONE EXPERIENCING THIS ISSUE WAS ABLE TO ISOLATE THE CAUSE OF THE PROBLEM (e.g., BY IDENTIFYING A SPECIFIC FAULTY DRIVER, BAD BIOS, CORRUPT OS or FAULTY HARDWARE).  One or more articles re: this issue suggested examining a specific DMP file to see the problematic drivers.  I did that, but the indicated driver seemed non-specific, i.e., something like ntokrnl.exe.  Corresponding memory addresses were indicated, but this kind of information doesn't help me.  I'm not a computer science engineer.

 

 

celawrencejr

ONE MORE THING

I should have mentioned that when I began to get the machine to boot into Windows 8, sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't.  If it didn't boot, I went back into BIOS and set BIOS to default settings.  I'm not sure whether that helped or not, but it seemed to be one of the actions that correlated with successful boots.  Clearly, I didn't and don't have a clue!!!