I assume by box, you do mean your tower? I do not believe in using sleep mode, I believe in doing a proper shut down, when not using your PC . Also it may be a power overload prob. try this, shut down, remove power cord, hold down start button for 20secs. then plug power cord back in and start up again.

try this, shut down, remove power cord, hold down start button for 20secs

Tried it -- no go. Problem w/shutdown, as I mentioned, is it fails to start up, initially. No light or anything on the power button. Afraid it will permanently not start.

Internal battery?

DA

I don't think there's any problem with putting a computer in Sleep mode - that's pretty much the standard for all Macs, and I use it pretty much all the time on my Win computers, in addtion to Hibernation mode, and only extremely rarely do I have problems.

But it sounds like there are two problems going on :

#1 After putting it to Sleep, you can't bring it back out of sleep.
#2 After it's Off, it won't restart using the Power button.

Do I have that right ?

A couple semi-random ideas . . .

When you start it back up in either #1 or #2 scenarios, do you get any response at all, besides some lights, as in, fan noises, hard drives spinning, etc. ?

What happens when you choose "Restart" ? Will it power off, then immediately boot back up ? Or it just goes to off and no restart.

A few things come to mind : faulty PSU, old CMOS battery on the motherboard, bad power switch, bad connections from PSU and/or Pwr Switch to mobo.

Like I said earlier, the internal battery. I may or may not be far off base as Barb is giving it some thought too. A cheap and easy option to try.

DA

I'm thinking about this a bit more. Actually I'm leaning towards bad PSU.
When a computer starts up, it waits for a "Power good" signal from the PSU. It takes a second for the PSU generated voltages to stabilize, and when that happens, the PSU sends a "Power Good" signal to the motherboard, saying it's ready, so to speak. If the mobo never gets that signal, the computer won't start.
Here's an explanation :

Power Good Signal - PCGuide

Although it's less likely it's the CMOS battery, It won't hurt to change it. Just remember you'll probably lose all your Bios settings, if you've changed any, So write down any customized settings first so you can reenter them later. If you were just running the defaults, it doesn't matter.

kbarb, from "sleep" the power-button does go from amber (sleep) to blue (on), but nothing else happens -- which then requires manually turning off, then on. From a completely off condition, pressing the power-button does nothing -- no light (until after 10-20 minutes of waiting).

I've read about dead CMOS batteries, and the consensus is that it won't stop the tower from coming on -- the BIOS setup screen will appear when it starts up w/BIOS default settings & requires resetting the time. That doesn't happen.

I'm beginning to think it does indeed seem like either a PSU or Mboard issue.

I'm not sure exactly how the circuitry works to control the amber/blue power-button light.
But I'd be curious what happens when the computer is up and running, and you hit "Restart".
If it still wouldn't restart, then I'd really suspect the PSU, as the physical power button wouldn't have anything to do with it in that scenario. Still, it could also be the mobo.

But basically, the motherboard sends signals to the PSU telling it to start up, so it could be either I guess. Power supplies do go out though - I've had a number of them fail, even supposedly high quality ones. You don't have an extra one lying around do you, that you could temporarily swap in ?

There are PSU testers - I have one actually. A little palm sized gizmo that I carry in my fixit bag, but I can't remember that I've actually ever used it.
Here they are on Newegg - see if this link works :
PSU testers on Newegg

Mine looks kind of like the Rexus.

There was another guy asking about power supplies here in the recent past, and I posted some sales I'd seen. You could check there. I think there is a way on Newegg to search for only things on sale.

kbarb, thanks for the response. Restart always works fine -- maybe because it never goes "off" in that situation. And for added info, the tower has never once locked up or frozen while running.

I've got old, working PSUs around, but after studying, they don't have the newer connections needed for my much newer tower/mboard. And they're 250W, while this one is 300W. Won't work...

Looking at HP's troubleshooting pages, seems like a bad PSU "should" be indicated by a flashing LED on the back. That LED have never flashed (it's always solid) during all this. So now I'm NOT confident that it's the PSU. I don't want to waste money/effort w/a new PSU & still have the problem. SMART-analysis on the WD hard-drive shows no issues, so pretty sure it's in good shape.

This kind of problem is difficult to diagnose/fix, so it might be easier/cheaper to buy a new bare-bones case, PSU and mboard and just transfer my hard-drive w/Windows on it, DVD-drive, graphics card, etc into the new box.

I think the main question is whether it's the PSU or the motherboard.
That PSU LED - I wonder how reliable it is - do the diagnostics on the PSU really measure everything, or does it just take a general look at functionality.

I don't think temporarily putting in a 250w PSU, just to see if it'd start for a couple of seconds would hurt anything. But if it doesn't have the right connectors you're kind of stuck there.

You could just buy a cheap PSU tester to get a handle on the PSU,
although indeed it could end up being a waste of money. On the other
hand, at least you could probably rule in or out the PSU.
There have been some pretty good sales on PSUs fairly frequently, recently. In my experience, they go out more often than mobos, but I've had my share of mobos die as well.

Getting a new mobo and using the same drive, untouched, can present problems, at least that's the way it used to be. When the OS starts to boot off the old drive, it first loads mass storage drivers, to work with what it thinks is the same mobo chipset it's used to. Those drivers may not work with the new chipset on the mobo, and it might not boot. There are cloning tools that can solve that problem - Acronis has a feature called "Universal Restore" in their imaging tools - but it can be a bit tricky. And there's the added expense of the software.
If you bought the exact same mobo, then it would probably work. But otherwise it might be better to reinstall the OS on a new box and transfer all the data over.

Kind of a head scratcher.

Well, as a test last night, I put it back to "sleep" mode to see what would happen. This morning -- strange. The power-light showed blue (on) and the keyboard light was also on. Seems that it came back on by itself sometime overnite. However, the monitor would not come out of power-down mode (usually a mouse-click will bring it out). So I clicked the power-button off (everything turned off) and immediately clicked again to start-up. It started back, but not as a reboot, but directly to Windows! Never seen that.

Yeah, putting an old HD w/Windows on a new Mboard might be problematic -- Windows would have to identify all the new hardware to get going. Windows7 seems quite good at installing new devices, but that might be stretching it to the limit. Plus the HP Windows installation might be proprietary enough to prevent it working on a non-HP box.

Aside, some other forum was talking about Puppylinux,

http://puppylinux.org/main/Overview%20and%20Getting%20Started.htm

and out of curiosity I downloaded the iso file, installed it on a boot-DVD and rebooted. It came up and after a few inputs got it working on its (windows-like) X-screen. A few more inputs and it identifies and connects to my wireless DSL modem and was online! Far easier to get working than older Linux distros from a few yrs ago.

You probably know this but the power buttons are usually "programmable" so to speak.
They can either be set to "Put to sleep" or "Power off" when pressed.
I've seen it where they're set to "Put to sleep", and I've thought the computer was off, but it was actually in Sleep mode, and came right out of sleep when pressed again. I have to remember to hold the Pwr button down for 4 seconds to make it actually power off.

That the monitor won't come out of sleep is a little mysterious but somehow telling - but of what I'm not totally sure. It needs to get a signal from the mobo, but the mobo needs to get power from the PSU. So which one is causing the problem ? Hard to say.
What if you use the Linux live cd, and choose "Restart" - will it then restart ?
But that would only rule out some kind of problem with your Windows OS, and we're not thinking that's the problem anyway.

The thing about putting a drive in a new computer, is that the mass storage drivers are loaded very early on, and that's what a "universal restore" feature is made to handle. All the other hardware will probably be identified in the boot process, and if the necessary drivers are not found, you can install them later. But there's usually no easy way to do that for the mass storage drivers as it just won't boot to the point that you would have an option to supply the correct ones.

If you want to install Win7 on a different machine, there is a tricky way to capture all the Win7 install boot info necessary, even though it's an OEM install for that particular machine.
I can give you the links if you're interested. I had to do it, although it was on the same machine I think, but a fresh install. It was a situation where I had a laptop with no install disks, and had to use a generic Windows install disk.

Yeh, the live Linux distros are fun. I just made a little bootable MicroSD flash gizmo with Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint, Pupply, and Knoppix, plus a whole bunch of other utility cds using a multiboot builder called Sardu. It really works well - boots anything on the MicroSD easily.

Sardu Multiboot Creator

Very handy, and gave one to my nephew as well.

Well, I looked for mboards & there are exact replacements for mine, so could go that way. Power supplies too. Guess I won't do it until absolutely necessary, but if it fails to come back on permanently, I'm in trouble (no internet to order stuff). Ran memtest86 and after 3 cycles (3 hrs) no errors were found, so mem sticks seem fine. SMART-drive analysis shows no problems w/hard-drive either. Even ran an HP stress-test and no problems were found -- tho CPU, video card, etc temps get real high.

Posting this from puppylinux (Seamonkey browser), and I'm impressed w/it. Loads from boot DVD & resides in memory. Writes updated settings to DVD during shutdown so settings are retained. What the help website recommends is not to load to a hard-drive (eliminating the bootloader problem), but to copy/run from a boot USB flashdrive. That's what I'll do.

So then, can you restart,etc without problems using Puppy ?

That would be interesting to know, because if so, you'd then suspect something wrong with the Win install or even the MBR, or partition table. But still, you'd expect more of a response at Power-on than just nothing. Even w/ a broken MBR you'd see the POST screen. Or it'd at least boot up to the point of locating the Windows boot loader. Or if the partition table was screwed up, you get that far and then an error.

Btw, I don't think there's any software utility that will test a power supply, at least none that I've heard of. Which doesn't mean there isn't one. Sometimes there is a screen in the BIOS or a mobo utility that will show the voltages, and that could be helpful.

Puppy is pretty good and lightweight. I checked a whole bunch of distros a while back to see which one I might choose for a main OS in the future. You might want to check out Mint as well, and there are several versions of it to choose from. Regular default Mint is very full featured, and popular with people that don't like Ubuntu's Unity desktop. But the point is, the Mint XFCE version is pretty lightweight and very functional - something to consider along with Puppy - and what I was going to use.

Most people are using Virtual Machines now to run various OSs, but if you ever want to set up a multiboot system, I've used XOSL. It's older, but simple and really works well, very versatile. Plop is newer and flashier, also good, but I tried it and still prefer XOSL. On the other hand, you could probably get really fast boot times just booting Puppy off a flash drive. They're really cheap now. In fact, you can put several distros on one flash drive.

kbarb, a restart done thru the Windows or Linux menu or turning completely off, then immediately back on by the power-button was never a problem. It's always when it's been off or sleeping for some hrs for the issue to come up. Something about cooling down to ambient temps causes it, which seems odd.

Unfortunately my current mboard BIOS screen doesn't have voltage readouts, but Speedfan shows the CPU-buss voltage as 1.10 V (but no other busses). Even my ancient tower from 13 yrs ago had PSU-buss voltage readouts in the BIOS and thru monitoring programs.

Thanks for the XOSL link. Bootable thumbdrives seems the modern way to go and does away with bootloader programs, complex drive-partitioning, etc. Windows7 update descriptions mentions problems (crashes after updates/restarts) using bootloader programs.

I looked at Mint, but for the time being I'll stick w/one Linux distro as it takes me a long time to get up to speed on even one OS, let alone many. I ran Peanut Linux for a few yrs as my main OS when Windows95 & NT weren't supported any more (refused to buy a new Windows OS). That's when I ran into bootloader issues when the one I was using (triple booting between Peanut Linux, Windows95 & WindowsNT) killed my NT installation (blue screen when choosing NT), but Linux or W95 would still boot OK.

Hmm, the scenarios by which it starts or doesn't start are really head-scratching.

I did have a laptop screen once that would lose it's backlighting after a while, and the theory was that the heat would eventually affect some bad/old/tired solder connection. If I rebooted it'd come back on. In your case it seems to be the opposite. You'd think then, once it cooled down, it would just never come back on again. I wonder if you could take a blow dryer and selectively heat something up, and see it if would then boot. Not that it would really solve the problem but it might be diagnostic.

1.1v for a mobo/cpu voltage is about 1/3 normal. That would be way off, but I'm wondering if it's really correct as I don't think the cpu could run off that.
See http://www.pcguide.com/ref/power/sup/func.ht (standard output voltages section)

Hmm. That voltage must be what's powering the fan.....

Forced to take to a repair shop -- it was indeed the power supply. Sleep & hibernate functions work normally again.