Laptop Sleep Issue

Aragorn- · February 16, 2025

Ive been having an ongoing issue with my laptop and hoping someone might have some ideas.

Firstly, some background which may or may not be related. Previously, i had a Lenovo A485. It seemed to develop an issue where if it was left sleeping for some period of time, it wouldnt turn back on. No life at all, power button was completely unresponsive. The only way to get it to turn back on was to either pull the battery out, or press the small reset button on the bottom with a pin. So i decided to replace it.

I bought an HP Elitebook 855 G8, cloned the Lenovo SSD over to the NVMe drive from the HP, and got everything up and running. Upgraded from Windows 10 to Windows 11 (using the "dont migrate drivers" flag on the installer to clear out all the old drivers). Everything looks great except it now has a slightly different sleep issue!

If i shut the PC down, or hibernate, everything is fine. However if i use the normal "Sleep" option, or leave it sat on the side until it goes to sleep, it gets itself in a similar though not quite identical state to the Lenovo. Specifically the laptop seems to goto sleep, the power led starts pulsing as is typical for these machines when sleeping. However pressing the power button to turn it back on does nothing. The only way to get it to turn on is by holding the power button for 4-5 seconds to fully turn it off. Then pressing it again at which point it boots from cold.

I've checked all the drivers are upto date using the HP update tool, as well as installing the latest AMD drivers but doesnt seem to have helped.

Anyone have any ideas?

T487 · February 16, 2025

This could be related to cloning the drive, opposed to performing a fresh install.

I am assuming you have had a poke around in the power options. There are the main power plan settings, but also some other options (on the upper-left of the screen) such as ‘Choose what the power buttons do’ & ‘Change when the computer sleeps’.

Aragorn- · February 18, 2025

It could indeed, though i've cloned dozens of SSD's over the years and never had an issue. Maybe its just the exception to the rule...

It seems the power plans are very "bare bones" now, something thats seemingly related to Modern Standby and newer versions of Windows.

I have an aversion to jumping immediately to "reinstall windows" as most of the time there is an actual fix that can be applied to an existing install. Its got me stumped though and really quite irritated every time i pick up the laptop to find it frozen.

I guess the next step is to throw a spare SSD in it and install windows fresh and confirm it works fine with a fresh install.