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gzembow

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HP laptop hibernates randomly and often

My almost 4 year old HP laptop for the past 4-6 weeks has been ramdomly hibernating - pretty regularly.

I can be working for 10 minutes after waking it in the morning and it will hibernate with just a quick warning.  It will sometimes come back immediately on its own or require me to press my power button. It might then do the same (hibernate cycle) 2-10 times before it either stays on for hours or it shuts down completely - losing any unsaved data.  Then I restart it and it can work for hours or start all over again.

I am running low on HD space, there is a Hibernate tab under the Power Settings Control Panel that indicates that I need over a gig for hibernate and I have under a gig available. Is that the problem?  Some postings mention the possibility of a recent XP update causing the problem?

I did notice what seems like the fan running more often so perhaps a CPU or mobo issue, but at times the hibernating problem occurs when the fan is dormant.

I am planning on getting the new Macbook rumored for October 15th-ish and running XP and Vista on it via virtual machines.  
But in the meantime any and all ideas and advice is appreciated, this is driving me c-R-a-Z-y!!!
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dblake15

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Hi gzembow,

I agree with the above recommendations. If these dont seem to work, have you recently performed a firmware upgrade on the system's BIOS? Even if you have not, I would check the power management settings within the BIOS in order to make sure it is not set to Hibernate after a period of time.

Also& your hard drive space is a huge issue when trying to hibernate, especially depending on how much you have going on when it tries to hibernate.

Regards,
Tony D.
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gzembow

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Sorry for being gone so long and I appreciate the responses.
I had turned off the hibernation switch and I checked the lid switch and it's fine.  There were no changes to the BIOS since it was bought.

I have noticed that the problem is not just hibernation, but half the time the laptop just shuts down suddenly with no indication.  And as it starts to reboot it will shut down 2-3 more times before coming back on.  Another symptom is that the Stand By Restart Shut Down window will pop up by itself and even after clicking Cancel it will repeat 3-5 times. Sometimes it stops but other times I can't and it shuts down.

There is a shortage of disk space, usually between a half gig and a gig and a half on a 100GB drive.  Is that possibly the cause of the problem?  Do I just have to make more disk space available? Or is it possibly a hardware failure?

Thanks.