Windows forgot how to shutdown or sleep!

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For no apparent reason, my Windows 10 (1903) system has forgotten how to shutdown or sleep. If I try to sleep, the screens go black for a second, and then appear again without change. If I try shutdown from the start menu, it pretends as if it is going to shutdown, but then leaves me at the login screen. I have tried a few things from googling, but the only way I have found so far to shutdown (other than the long power button) is “shutdown /p” from an administrator command prompt.

Any ideas?

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Fred

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I’d the same issue with Shutdown on the same version of Windows. This Registry hack is what solved it:  How to automatically close apps during Windows 10 shutdown.

At this writing I haven’t needed a hack for Sleep so I don’t have that.

Human, who sports only naturally-occurring DNA ~ oneironaut ~ broadcaster

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Fred

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Thank you, Michael for that tip. I don’t think that is where my problem is. My system won’t even sleep, which doesn’t try to close apps. But I tried it anyway to no avail.

I tried to kill everything that would go away in the task manager, that didn’t help.

I tried a clean boot, that didn’t help.

Help!

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Here’s a good article explaining three different approaches to using the command line to sleep your system. If any of them works, it would point to a user interface problem rather than a deeper system issue.

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Fred

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finally “Shutter – Lite ” did the trick for me, and let my pc sleep again, see:
< https://www.den4b.com/products/shutter >

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BigBadSteve

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You can also use PowerShell, the commandlets are:
Stop-Computer (to power off)
Restart-Computer (to reboot)

There doesn’t appear to be a way to sleep via PS, however.

To hibernate, you can use shutdown.exe in a PS or CMD window, with the /h flag like so:
shutdown /h
If you want to force running apps to close, use with /f like so:
shutdown /h /f

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that’s great
though I was writing about automated sleep, repeatedly

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[Tem]

Our desktop PC developed a would-not-sleep issue after a Windows 10 upgrade to 1809 (?) and/or an Intel(R) HD Graphics 630 driver upgrade obtained from the OEM (Lenovo).  I eventually traced the problem to the companion  Intel(R) Display Audio driver, which is loaded even though the attached ASUS monitor doesn’t have speakers.

I disabled the Display Audio driver in Device Manager, and now the machine sleeps normally.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by Tem.

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Fred

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Well, this string got mentioned in “best of the lounge”, so I should post a follow up. For no apparent reason, sleep started working again. But some more details follow…

First, shutdown (but not sleep) started working again. I have no idea if anything I did caused this. Then, during one day, several anomalous events happened:

1. Network stopped working. Really weird: At one point, no cable connection was reported. Sure enough, link light off. Removed network cable, and link light came on! Reinserting cable did not fix problem (did I try rebooting? Not sure, I would think I would have). I deleted the network driver and rebooted, and it was fixed.

2. Gmail stopped working (chrome). (IIRC reload didn’t fix) Killed the tab and restarted to fix it.

3. Google calendar stopped working. Killing tab and restarting didn’t fix. Used Edge until next reboot.

memtest86 didn’t show anything interesting. memtest86+ also, except when I enabled all four cores to run simultaneously. It froze after a few minutes. Repeating, it froze in exactly the same place. I’m going to blame software for that one.

Shortly after all those fun events, sleep started working, and there have been no further interesting events since!

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b

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