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Wake Up! Windows Won’t Resume From Standby or Hibernation?

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A common problem users experience when running Windows Home, Professional, XP, or Vista – is that it won’t resume from standby or hibernation. In particular, while Windows will go into standby or hibernate, on occasion it won’t wake up. Or – it will sound like it’s woken up, and your keyboard lights may work, but your monitor won’t come back on.

While the cause of this may have to do with your Windows installation, or hardware or application drivers (such as graphics drivers in the case of the monitor not waking up – if this is the case, try updating your graphics drivers), we’ve found that it’s a lot more likely to be caused by memory leaks in applications. Next time Windows won’t resume from standby or hibernation mode (actually, you probably want to try this before) try the following:

Close out web browsers before standby or hibernate

Try closing out your web browsers, in particular Firefox, which is known for its memory leaks. You should check your task manager to confirm that the web browser processes have been terminated. For Firefox and Internet Explorer, for example, you’d look for the firefox.exe and iexplore.exe processes. This solved the problem for us, and since we’ve made this change we haven’t had problems getting Windows to wake up from standby or hibernation mode. If for some reason your Windows continues to get stuck in standby or hibernation mode, post below and the We Rock Your Web community members will help you troubleshoot.

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Alex Schenker

Alex has been involved on the business side of the internet since the early 2000's. He holds both a Management Science degree from the University of California at San Diego as well as a Computer Science degree from NJIT. We Rock Your Web had its roots back in 2004 as the tech blog for a web design and development company Alex founded that has grown and evolved into the parent company of We Rock Your Web. While his foundation is rooted in web development, his expertise today lies in content and digital marketing, SEO, organic and paid search, analytics, and publishing. Alex is an avid tennis player, nature enthusiast, and hiker, and enjoys spending time with his wife, friends, and dogs.
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