These two problems started yesterday, and I feel somehow the two are related. Last night I tried to shut down the computer, and after the window that says "Please wait while Windows shuts down" disappears, the blue background behind it was still there and my mouse still worked for almost five minutes, like something was hanging. Usually it's only 20 seconds after the window disappears that the computer shuts down. Last night I had to manually shut it down by holding the power button. Then today, usually I can close my laptop lid and it will go right into sleep mode without trouble. It didn't do that today at all, and I didn't notice it until I had picked it up again to use it, and a window was there along with my background. The window said "Please standby". None of my keystrokes were detected (I tried Esc then Ctrl Alt Del, nothing worked). I was forced again to use the power button to shut it off, then waited five minutes to reboot. I'm feeling that some process is causing it to hang so that it doesn't shut down or sleep properly, but I can't imagine what. I've already run a couple of virus scans to see what else could be the problem and nothing's turned up. I'm using a Dell Latitude D620 with Windows XP Pro and SP3. Thanks in advance for any help.
hmmm! thats strange nashida! you should take your laptop to a electronic store like frys or any place in your area where you live that has people who specialize in that type of stuff.
Well, this is what I've managed to trim it down to: either my antivirus programs aren't ending upon shutdown, thus causing the hang, or my dwindling disk space is really the culprit. I just did a disk cleanup and managed to gain back almost 5 GB of space I didn't have before, so we'll see what happens.
Disk space isn't a issue for shutting down the PC. To be honest, their are so many things that can cause stuff like this the only easy way to fix it is to backup your important files and reinstall windows. Though, my laptop has the sleep mode issue also time-to-time. I found that closing it while its performing a task normally causes it.
Well, it shut down within 20 seconds last night, and went to sleep successfully this afternoon while I was working, so I still don't know what first caused the hangups.
