I have windows 7 professional installed. I've been using sleep mode for years to turn my computer 'off' and only reboot or actually power down when absolutely necessary. In fact, I even had the 'Shut down' button changed to 'Sleep'
Yesterday. It was suddenly greyed out. I could no longer use it.
Yesterday, I had removed all my Nvidia Display drivers because why did I need them without the card?
Two days ago, my Geforce GTX 480 had died and I had to remove it from the system so that I could use the onboard video dvi port to keep using my computer. (with the graphics card in, it would default to that and crash on boot up)
A little digging around has brought me to this:
C:\Windows\system32>powercfg -a The following sleep states are available on this system: Hibernate The following sleep states are not available on this system: Standby (S1)
The system firmware does not support this standby state.
The VGAPNP.SYS display driver does not support standby. Please consult your hardware vendor for an updated display driver. Standby (S2)
The system firmware does not support this standby state.
The VGAPNP.SYS display driver does not support standby. Please consult your hardware vendor for an updated display driver. Standby (S3)
The VGAPNP.SYS display driver does not support standby. Please consult your hardware vendor for an updated display driver. Hybrid Sleep
So apparently, my ability to use sleep mode is directly tied to my video card and video drivers. Which explains why it's grayed out, I think. But now I have a bigger question:
Why is my sleep mode directly tied into my video card drivers?
Since it's a function of windows, and graphics cards are essentially optional in some cases, I don't see why these two things should affect each other.
I'm aware of this question: Why is a video card needed to put my system in sleep mode? but it isn't answered. And he's more or less asking how he still can, I'm asking why they are related.