Have you tried (or will you now try) Vista SP1 RC?

http://tinyurl.com/2qnum6

My girlfriends father was having all kinds of similar problems and they continued to escalate with driver corruptions in all areas.
I uninstalled Norton and some add-aware program used AVAST instead and all is now well.

Agreeing with the above, I’ve had to reinstall OSX three times in the past year for the same thing. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, it freezes solid when power management tries to do something like put it to sleep, wake it up, etc. I solidly blame OSX because I don’t really feel like looking into it and it’s easier to whine about the OS than try to figure out what’s wrong with it. Meanwhile, my other laptop running WinXP for the past 18 months, the laptop I actually use for a living, hasn’t once had a problem. Thanks for nothing, Apple.

james, you speak so confidently. its almost as if you were a software or hardware developer! glad you are doing your readers such a service by pointing out the obvious problems with vista such as mysterious problems with um… wait what was the problem with again? oh thats right, we dont know yet. better just play it safe and blame vista.

tnkgrl, no, nothing has changed, no new h/w, no programs installed. Just business as usual, except my system now crashes.

Have you connected any new peripherals to the HP dock recently?

I experienced a number of sleep-related issues with my 2710p, which I eventually traced back to the Intel wireless LAN driver. I downloaded the current version of the 4965AGN from Intel rather than HP, and have had zero problems sleeping or resuming since then. The driver still works with the HP Wireless Assistant if you use that to manage wireless adapter power.

Another thing you might try is opening System properties, clicking the “Performance” link at the bottom of the sidebar, clicking “Advanced Tools” in the next window’s sidebar, and see if there are any issues listed under the “Performance issues” section. This is what finally led me to target the Intel WLAN driver, as there was an issue listed stating the existing driver was causing Vista to enter and exit power saving states slowly.

In that same app is a quick link to event log entries detailing performance problems. There are details about things which cause power management issues, startup and shutdown delays, etc. Very handy info to have when troubleshooting issues such as this.

OK, I’ve restored the system to my oldest system restore point which was just prior to this problem. We’ll see how it does tonight.

I had a similar problem with vista on my Fujitsu T2010. To prevent it from happening again I changed the lid behaviour so that the computer does nothing if the lid is opened or closed. Instead, I manually put it into sleep and wake it with the power button. Since then I have had no more problems, albeit at the cost of a little inconvenience.

I see I still have a way to go to get used to inking on a Tablet.

James, I know you said you checked Windows and HP logs. But there could be other culprits behind this. It could be a firewall or anti-virus app. It could be some other app you recently installed or updated. I’d check all of those things just to be sure, if you haven’t already.

Woadan

Could it be a memory issue? After years of reliable operation my aging dual 1 GHz MDD Mac began crashing upon awakening from sleep if it had been asleep for more that an hour or two. The cause turned out to be a flaky memory module that wasn’t detected by the hardware test disk. The computer never rebooted itself but Macs seem to do that pretty infrequently.

I feel for you I really do. while I would not wallow in another’s pain, I have to declare that I have first taken the plunge and now own the most basic of HP 271 Op Notebooks. Fortunately for merit would seem, this one came with XP Tablet Edition 2005. Here’s to your finding an acceptable solution.

Is this suspend/sleep or hibernate? Have you tried triggering that mode with lid open and self present? Okay, these are pretty obvious, and I’m silly, but anyway… Good luck…

Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to have the machine go into hibernation mode over night?

It takes not very many seconds to hibernate and the machine actually turns itself off and thus can’t crash.

Booting a hibernated machine is also a matter of seconds.

Yeah, I have this problem frequently with my core 2 duo MBP. I wake it up from sleep to find out it’s rebooted. I also have to re-sleep it often to get it out of black screen. Sleep is notorious as the single hardest hardware feature to properly support because of USB drivers and network drivers that have difficulty saving state, among other subsystems. It’s too bad Vista can’t recover from this common issue however. Good luck.