Help! T61 will not standby, but LCD shuts off

Ok guys, here's another nut to crack.

History:
- Bought my T61 in July, had no problems since then. Been happily computing with Vista, applying any Windows updates as they were available but none of the Lenovo updates apart from when the machine was brand new.
- Last night I did a full backup of my Windows partition and my Data partition to a USB hard drive, no problems there.
- Also installed another Vista update for Windows Defender from MS.
- This morning everything was still ok and I briefly browsed the web before going to work.

THEN:
- Upon coming home I noticed there was no "moon" symbol on the laptop and it was unresponsive. Rebooted, it looked ok (it was plugged into the AC.)
- The system is fine in all respects as long as I keep it plugged in. I can close the lid and enter standby, and open the lid and resume.
- If I am on battery, closing the lid will cause the machine to go out to lunch. The LCD will power down but the "moon" icon will not light up. I can hear the hard drive still spinning.
- I can reproduce the same problem if I manually hit Fn-moon with the lid open: the LCD shuts off but the CPU doesn't.

I've installed BIOS 1.26 but it made no difference. I have all recent Vista updates installed. Powering down will allow the machine to wake up again.

Anyone seen something like this? In only occurs when on battery.

Thanks!

EDIT: Things I have tried so far:
- Pulling battery and putting it back
- Updating the Power Manager software
- Checked that I have "allow computer to sleep" set in the advanced power options -> Multimedia sharing
- Hitting F8 when booting and selecting "Use last good config"
- Killing most active processes using Task Manager
- Pulling my DVDRW drive and unplugging my USB mouse (both have worked for months...)
- Using hibernate instead of sleep
- Latest BIOS

I'm already at my wits end with this thing. Of course I could reinstall Vista and go through the pain of reconfiguring everything *again*, but this is exactly the kind of problem Vista was supposed to solve! It should preempt any process and force it to sleep.

 

This sounds like a software issue. Some hardware devices may be set to keep the laptop out of sleep, like the ethernet or wireless cards.

Reinstalling Windows may fix the problem. In the meantime, use the hibernation feature.

 

I tried hibernate, same thing: only LCD shuts off.

Should have got a Mac, I tell ya!

 

UPDATE: it's fixed!

I searched the forums and the most common suggestions were to update the BT drivers and grahpics drivers.

It just so happened that I had updated those drivers from the manufacturer websites when I got my machine, eg. my X3100 driver was a beta version from Intel. It had worked very well until now.

Some time later MS patches for those drivers appeared, and I had been ignoring them because they were earlier versions than what I had. Now I decided that I had nothing to lose by applying them. There are no KB numbers associated with the patches, they are just labeled "Broadcom BT" and "Intel Video."

I ran WEI again and my performance is just as good as before. *whew*!

 

Thanks to this thread, and reinstalling the BT and video drivers from lenovo, my laptop now sleeps like a baby! I guess the bottom line would be to not necessarily trust the drivers provided by windows update. (i know this was true in the past - i was hoping it was better with vista!). Thanks for the help!

 

Good lesson learned. Keep your windows updated. Schedule Windows Udate to do that for you. The latest updates have been very helpful in reliability and performance. It will only get better until SP1 comes out

 

Every time I take my machine and bring it back on sleep or hiberanate , my external monitor wont show any display . i have to restart . I have not tried stand by . any one has seen this behavior