standby hijinxs

[charlottepringl]

Hello!! I have a Sony Vaio laptop that's about 6 mos. old now (specs below), and I've noticed some strange happenings when it goes into standby.

First, the standby itself isn't regular. It has gone into screen saver and powered off at 15 min., 1 hour, and once it didn't power off at all.

Second, I've lost my sound on two occasions. I can still hear the Windows sounds, but I don't get any sound from media. Unfortunately, after the forum idea was given to me, I was unable to recreate the sound loss to get the error message for you; but there was an error message, and at the same time the device manager told me that the sound devices were working properly.

I probably haven't given you much to go on, but thank you in advance for anything help or advice you can give me.

SPECS: (what I could decipher from Everest and my device manager)
Sony Vaio VGN-FE660G
Windows XP Media Center, sp2
CPU: Mobile DualCore Intel Pentium M, 1666MHz
Motherboard Chipset: Intel Calistoga i945GM/PM
System Memory: DDR2-533 DDR2-SDRAM, 1014MB
Hard Drive: Hitachi, Travelstar 5K100?
Optical Drive: Matshita Uj-850D
Sound: SigmaTel Audio, Direct X?

 

[Raffaz]

You can check the error messages by going to event viewer as they are time and date coded. Get to event viewer through control panel > admin tools. When you find the error (if there is one) post it up

 

[charlottepringl]

I've looked in the event viewer, and error messages are logged under 'System' and 'Application'. The problem is that I don't understand most of what I'm seeing, and haven't seen any that I can easily attribute to the sound devices. And, of course, I didn't think to take note of the date when it happened, although I know it was recent enough to still be in the range of dates I see in the viewer.

thanks.

 

[Raffaz]

It would be really hard to isolate the problem without an actual error to work with

 

[charlottepringl]

I think most of the errors I'm looking at have something to do with my network/internet. The only one I can't really figure out is this one:

source: acpiec, category: none, event: 1

\Device\ACPIEC: The embedded controller (EC) hardware didn't respond within the timeout period. This may indicate an error in the EC hardware or firmware, or possibly a poorly designed BIOS which accesses the EC in an unsafe manner. The EC driver will retry the failed transaction if possible.

0000: 00680000 00be0001 00000000 c0050001
0010: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
0020: 00000000 00000000 00369e99 ffff0011
0030: 00070071 00140011 00660081 006502a1
0040: 00e40011 020e06a1 00200211 00073741
0050: 003d0816 00070066 03e70056 00070076
0060: 00140a16 015f0086 046908a6 001b0a16
0070: 00201a16 00078036 00111815 003f1810
0080: 00080060 059e0190 00130070 00121a10

Don't know if that helps at all, but thanks for working with me.

 

[Raffaz]

Thats what i thought, looks like a BIOS problem to me. You need to get the latest BIOS update for the ACPI to work properly, its a common cause of standby and hibernation problems.

 

[charlottepringl]

Is the BIOS a windows thing? Where would I go to get a BIOS update??

Thanks!!

 

[Raffaz]

The BIOS is what you see when you first turn the pc on. You will get an update from the laptop manufacturers website. I should warn you tho, if you do it wrong then the computer could be dead, so if your not 100% confident, then get someone who knows what they are doing, to do it for you

 

[charlottepringl]

alright, thank you!