Computer is extremely slow after sleep

Miksu

Regular
I just finished building a new mini-itx htpc machine. I equipped the system with these parts:

Jetway JNC81-LF AM2+ AMD780G Mainboard
AMD Athlon II X2 235e 2.7GHz Dual Core AM3 CPU - 45W
Kingston 2GB 800Mhz DDR2 SoDIMM
Windows 7 x64 Ultimate

Everything else is working just nicely but the sleep mode of computer is causing problems (big surprise...). After the computer wakes up, it's just extremely slow. I tried to run the Win7's own performance tool but after 30minutes or so, I quit it because it was only half-way through.

If I start the Media Center after the sleep mode, the UI isn't smooth and sometimes it takes almost 15 seconds for the screen to refresh after I've pressed a key. There doesn't seem to be any processes using the CPU and cpu-z shows that the processor is still able to raise it's clocks to the maximum 2.7GHz (the cpu usually idles at 800MHz).

I'm thinking that the problem is somehow related to the integrated GPU. After waking up, the Aero is gone. There's no transparent windows or anything. But the Aero works just fine before sleeping. I upgraded the Catalyst's to the version 10.4 but it didn't help. I've also upgraded the chipset drivers.

Any ideas? I think I'll try to unplug every USB-device and see if it helps but I'm not counting on it. I don't think there's a newer BIOS available for my motherboard so I can't try that.

edit: The performance doesn't recover at any point. I've tried to leave the computer alone for 15 minutes after waking it up but it was still extremely slow.
 
There's a few things off the top of my head that could possibly contribute to this problem.

1. Possible HPET problems in BIOS. Either set incorrectly or if no setting available defaulted to 32 bit. Can check in BIOS power management options to see (that's where it is on my MB at home). Note that incorrect HPET settings doesn't always prevent properly working sleep mode, but does seem to cause problems in some cases.

2. Are you connected via HDMI? If so there may be an issue with HDCP handshaking possibly. Worth making sure your display is on prior to waking the computer. Although with hibernate not showing issues, I'm disinclined to give this much credence.

Regards,
SB
 
Thank you for your suggestions Silent_Buddha. I tried to find the HPET settings from the BIOS and found one, which allowed me to enable or disable the feature. It was enabled by default. I didn't find any setting which would have allowed me to switch between different modes of HPET.

I'm connected to the TV with DVI.

I did some more testing and removing all the USB peripherals didn't help. I then noticed that if I first put the computer into the sleep mode, then wake it, then hibernate it and wake it again, the speed resumes to normal :)

I also did some pifast runs before and after the sleep and the speed difference was quite small (32 sec vs 34 sec), so the whole problem seems to be related to graphics. Most of the time I only have the media center enabled and it works so horribly slowly after the sleep mode that I thought the whole computer is slow. But the CPU performance seems to be just fine.

I tried tinkering with the performance saving options of the GPU in the bios but disabling the features didn't help at all. Changing the UMA frame buffer size from AUTO to 256 didn't help either. "Internal Graphics Mode" is set to UMA+SidePort.

Like I mentioned, I lose Aero after resuming the computer from sleep (but not when resuming from hibernate) and I'm currently googling about that. I tried use Ati's "Restart Runtime" functionality after the sleep but it didn't do anything. I've seen some recommendations about MCE Standby Tool so maybe I'll try that next.

edit: Well, this is the first thing I found after googling the issue:

Problem:
MediaCenter works fine, put system to sleep(S3), wake system from sleep, MediaCenter is unusable. It doesn't respond to keyboard or mouse input, videos don't play, etc ... The only solution is to reboot and then MediaCenter works again. I have also confirmed that Windows Aero is also disabled in this situation as well. When awaking from sleep the screen flashes once or twice and Aero shuts off.

Exactly my symptoms. Too bad that this is with integrated NVidia graphics... (Shuttle SN78SH7 - nForce 630a/8200 - BIOS SN78S10Y).

another edit: It seems I'm not alone with this problem. From Technet I got the tip of trying to restart the Desktop Window Manager after sleep but the program crashes with error code 0x8898009b.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Thank you for your suggestions Silent_Buddha. I tried to find the HPET settings from the BIOS and found one, which allowed me to enable or disable the feature. It was enabled by default. I didn't find any setting which would have allowed me to switch between different modes of HPET.

Did you try disabling HPET? It may possibly slow down overall media playback, but I'm interested to see if it helps with your resume from sleep problem.

Regards,
SB
 
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