It seems possibly similar to the issue in this thread from a couple months ago, except I don’t shut down my computer. It’s always on when this happens.
Every few weeks, I’ll wake up and my Windows 7 desktop computer will be in limbo. Like it’s sleeping, the power button is flashing, but it won’t respond at all to keyboard or mouse input. The fans are clearly running too. Unplugging/replugging in the mouse or keyboard does nothing. My only recourse is to hold the power or reset button down on the box.
I have it set up to never sleep, just turn the monitor off after 5 hours. I have updates set to check with me before downloading and installing, so it’s none of that (and the first time it happened I accidentally had it set up to never even check).
I checked the event log, and there’s a “critical power failure” event from the kernel at each time I’ve encountered this, but the curious thing is that they’re all from when I woke up that day. They’re logging me hard resetting it with the power button – it has the power button press and says the computer was NOT in sleep mode when it lost power. This means that the OS was running well enough to log me manually hard resetting it, but not well enough to respond to anything.
It’s not a huge deal, except it makes me lose my Chrome tabs and may some day corrupt a file or something. Can anyone think of why this might be happening and how to fix it?
It could be heat related. Might be time to open up the case and see if all the fans, such as the one on the cpu, are spinning. Then take some air in a can and blow out all the dust bunnies especially near vents and air intakes.
Next I’d recommend shutting off your computer every couple of days or so. Rebooting Windows seems to fix a multitude of problems.
You may have it set to not sleep, but the blinking power button makes it sound like it is still going to sleep.
Something very similar happened to me last Fall. I’d go to wake my computer and nothing would happen apart from the fan running. It wouldn’t even respond to the power button being held; I had to unplug the thing, wait 10-15 seconds, and plug it back in to get it to boot. Eventually, frustration drove me to the, “try every stupid thing someone on the internet suggests”, phase of debugging and I stumbled on a post recommending that I go into the bios and change my ACPI settings to a different suspend mode. S3, maybe? I resolved to try them all and- lucky me- the first change did it.
Long story short: It worked but I really don’t know why. I hadn’t changed my OS power settings or the system hardware at all; the problem just showed up one day. Windows Vista 64, by the way.