Scary Hardware Race Condition ?: Power On while Sleep/Shutdown still in progress ?!

SNIP

My guess is you have a capacitor on the motherboard that is starting to fail. Take a look and see if you can see any bulging tops.... If so, be prepared to have more fail with time. :(

I see problems with the sleep function where the PC will not fully sleep, but start back up. I also see the PC crash when trying to sleep or hibernate. This has been on several computers. All in all, I think this function in computers is not very well tested and likely various drivers do not properly support it.

In other words, PCs suck!

Sleep functions tend to run into problems with USB peripherals with drivers that do not recover gracefully from being suspended. My HP scanner very bad in that respect (though optically excellent).

Quite a lot of sleep functions are poorly tested. Hibernate tends to be better behaved and on an SSD based machine plenty fast enough.

Worth trying it again with all peripherals unplugged - it may not be the PC that is at fault so much as one of the attached USB devices. It was very *much* worse in the past when USB was new.

I think I have found the culprit, it was also one of my suspicions, though now the suspicion is very big.

It could be that the antec 1200 case power button after 9 years or so of every day usage has worn out ?! Or some filth is making it stuck.

So now a defective/filthy shitty 1 dollar plastic power button is putting my DreamPC/Nightmare PC from 2006 at risk ?! Fokking sick.

This is not the first time I have seen power buttons misbehave.

This round button is the same shitty design I have seen on chieftecs and other cases...

Fokking annoying.

Please design power buttons so they can operate for 50 years or something.

Not just 5 or 10 years.

You can get the case power switches on ebay for $1

While the power button does get stuck it does not appear to be the main pro blem.

Yesterday my conclusion didn't quite feel right because the observed behavi our was more complex than just a failed/stuck button.

So today this conclusion is invalidated/corrected.

What caused it to be invalidated is this:

Today I thought I was going to be smart and use the usb mouse/mouse button to startup the computer.

And the same damn thing happened:

Computer powers up for a few seconds and then shutsdown... and then it woul d not come on at all.

Now for as far as I know the usb mouse button was never allowed to power on the system but it would do it anyway/always when touching/moving the mouse .

This time however it would auto-shutdown.

So I am now back to my original hypothesis that somehow the rapid sleep/pow er on cycle somehow lead to this situation.

It's either a bug in the bios's settings. Though this seems somewhat unlike ly since I removed the battery. Unless it has some kind of storage medium t hat can contain it's information even if power removed ?!

Or this rapid cycle caused some kind of power surge like I have seen before ... The original hypothesis from years ago is some kind of power surge is c aused by rapid on/off/on/off, killing motherboards. So I was lucky it didn' t kill off my motherboard completely and it can still power up after 3 atte mpts ?!

Thanks for this tip to try and unplug all usb devices !

Indeed perhaps USB devices store some weird information.

I will try it out and see what happens ! ;)

Ok I de-tached all cables and unplugged everything.

Then I let it be like that for two minutes or so.

Then replugged everything, turned on the power supply switch.

I also swapped the usb keyboard/usb mouse to force at least windows to re-detect those which eventually it did.

Then I tried to power up the computer, I tried it 3 or 4 times with power switch.

The PC would just go on and then off. Totally weird.

Then I decided to take out my digital camera and record it for you guys to let you see how weird it is.

I also removed a book that was on top of the computer, placed this recently on it... but this was after the problems started. Removed the book just in case.

Then I started filming... then I hit the power switch.

And tada ?! The computer would suddenly boot normally ! LOL.

So weird it's funny !

Anyway I am not going to jinx anything further today.

Maybe the unplugging of the cables might have helped or maybe not.

Tomorrow is another day and then I will see how it boots.

It kinda feels like a car engine that fails to start because of not enough torque or something.

It feels like the fans won't spin hard enough so the system shuts down.

I clearned the system and re-oiled the fans one or two months ago or so... so doesn't seem it has anything to do with that.

I also greaced this little fan inside of it yesterday cause it was making a zooming/whining noise... oiling the heck out of it helped a lot ! 10x times more quite when it comes to the steely whine noise.

Anyway thanks for the tips ! Also thanks to all that responded.

The mystery continues for now...

Bye, Skybuck.

What attached USB devices??? This is a laptop with the *only* external peripheral a mouse that gets its adapter pulled before the hibernate. There are internal USB devices, at lease hubs. But not much you can do about them.

I had a Toshiba portable a long while back (actually still working after a fashion) with a very nasty internal keyboard and mouse hardware fault. This was confirmed by running Linux on it. Basically after a while 2-8 hours typically the keyboard, mouse and on/off switch would lock up. Inserting a new mouse keyboard would work for another period but there was no way to get the on/off button back working or to have it respond to any of the shutdown in software modes.

The only way to switch off was by physical removal of the battery. Not ideal.

It was the trackpad and keyboard driver that gave me trouble that time. Symptoms were just the same with Doze, and 2 flavours of Linux. (it managed to work OK until just after its warrantee expired)