SPIN 111-33 - Going to Standby by itself

The laptop randomly transitions itself into a sleep or standby mode without being asked to. Sometimes it does it multiple times after just a few seconds of use on each attempt, other times it'll go for 10-15 minutes or more like right now as I type this. When it goes to standby, the little LED by the power button turns from blue to orange. Pressing the power button generally wakes it up, although it often cycles right back into standby several times before it'll stay awake for a few minutes and let me do anything. It suddenly just started doing this about a month ago with no configuration changes from me. I have tried going into Windows 10 power settings and disabled any timeouts to keep the thing powered no matter what, but that had no effect. Going into or out of tablet mode makes no difference, and folding it into a tablet configuration makes no difference... it just randomly goes into standby. Perhaps this is a hardware problem, but I'm hoping it's not because it probably won't be worth paying to fix it. Perhaps someone may have some idea why this suddenly started happening about a month ago. I'm running Windows 10 in Home mode, the unit has an N5000 processor, 4GB RAM and 64GB storage... pretty standard configuration.

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billsey

Check your battery stats, they might be confused and forcing the shutdown thinking it's low.

RickM

Thanks, Billsey, but the battery monitor is working great. This problem occurs regardless of what it's reporting, even right after charging when it indicates a full charge with 100% remaining. Right now it's at 77% remaining and it's behaving itself, but that'll likely change shortly...

billsey

There's not a lot that can cause those symptoms, either the system thinks the battery has gotten too low, the system thinks the temperature is too high, or it thinks that enough idle time has elapsed to go into a normal sleep mode. By far the most common of those is having the battery giving the system bad data or the system is taking good data from the battery and thinking it is lower than it actually is. Temperature readings are easy to check. If you turn the laptop on after some time sitting and the temperature is immediately shown at 90+C then the temperature sensor might be bad... But it's bonded into the CPU, so that's really unlikely. Is the date/time looking correct?

RickM

That makes good sense, but as far as I can tell, everything appears nominal. I had thought about battery and time, so my fist step was to set power management so that the laptop would always be on with no power saving or timeouts. I also downloaded a CPU temp monitor app, and I've not seen anything even close to getting out of a normal range. The battery monitor appears to function normally, tracking battery usage over time and properly showing charging. The clock maintains proper time. I also thought about maybe the hardware thinking that the laptop lid/screen might be closing, which would put the machine to sleep, so I popped the body and screen housing apart looking for a loose ribbon cable or wire that might intermittently trigger a false laptop closure. Everything seems secure and proper. Strangely enough, the thing has run all day today without a glitch with me occasionally using it and otherwise just leaving it sit powered up. A day ago it wouldn't stay awake more than a few seconds... a couple of times I couldn't even get my screen password fully typed in before it went to sleep. I resisted the temptation to toss it across the room and after a half-dozen such cycles it finally stayed awake. Today it's been completely normal. Go figure.

billsey

It probably wouldn't hurt to run through a couple of Windows battery calibration cycles. Disconnect power and run until Windows shuts down due to low battery then plug it in and wait for full battery indication. Each of those cycles will get Windows better set to show correct numbers. If your typical use doesn't actually run the battery down much, it will go out of calibration.

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