For laptop users, one of the major things I’ve noticed extremely convenient is it’s portability, and even more so when a netbook is being used. But they aren’t without their flaws. Fragile and easy to break are the reasons why I know for a fact I’d never be able to go around with a Netbook, and it’s not hard to see that those would also carry over to a laptop as well. If you’re careful, sure the laptop lasts longer, but in the end, most times, it will always work out cheaper to buy a new laptop then to face and fix that old one. However, if you don’t have the money, often times, you’re out of luck and will need to stick to what you’ve got. I was looking at a netbook to replace this present laptop and with the cheapest one being around $350 for even half decent specs, I’ve forced to keep what I’ve got, with all it’s bugs.
And it’s actually one of these bugs that has annoyed me last night, the fact that I shut my computer lid and it didn’t go to sleep.
Instead, it remained on all last night, so when I came back to my computer after sleeping, I found that the battery had completely drained and I had a battery that was now dead. Considering that I was going to take this laptop with me when I went out to get it registered with the Canadian government (so when I come back from my trip, I don’t get charged for it), I now couldn’t do that.
So, instead, I looked for a way to restore sleep to my laptop if you close the laptop lid. The first thing I tried was resetting my power plans back to their defaults, but if you’ve had this problem before, you might have run into the same issue I did: it didn’t work. So I figured it was time to get inventive, and head into Device Manager.
Our old friend, Device Manager
At this point, I then proceeded to remove the Mobile Intel(R) 965 Express Chipset driver, and re-install it. Before rebooting, I also grabbed the BIOS update that was off Gateway’s official support site and ran it as well, before being forced to reboot once the update was completed. Once back into Windows 7, I was able to test and see if I was able to put it into sleep mode, with no problems whatsoever. So the quick and dry solution that I’ve worked out to work for this problem is as follows:
- Remove graphic card driver though Device Manager
- Reinstall the driver
- Flash to updated BIOS if you can
- Reboot
It took me about ten minutes to go though all of this, so if you’re pressed for time, this won’t take long at all to complete and you’ll be ready to go around with your laptop once more. However, take care in flashing your computer’s BIOS. This might cause problems down the road which is why most BIOS flashing applications will back up your BIOS before hand, but just make sure to keep it in mind.