Windows Vista System Restore worked
Sunday, October 21st, 2007On Saturday, I installed an updated Intel (wired) network adapter driver on my HP 2710p Tablet PC and eventually discovered that my nice, fast 3-5 seconds to enter sleep mode were now anywhere from 1-2 minutes. I was highly annoyed. Curiously, the event log entries that were showing up as the system went to sleep indicated a problem with the Intel wireless adapter driver, not the wired adapter for which I’d updated the driver. A search for the error turned up nothing but complaints about Intel’s wireless adapter driver.
I experimented with some things and even rolled the driver back to the previous version using Device Manager. Nothing helped and I was still dealing with sleep times of a minute or more. As someone who puts his system to sleep many times a day and shuts down maybe once a week or so, this was not acceptable. So I did something I’ve never done before in Windows Vista (and only twice in Windows XP): I used a System Restore point to revert the system to the way it was prior to the driver update.
To my delight, the problem was resolved and my tablet is now back to entering sleep mode in under five seconds. This was the first time I’d seen a problem like this from a driver update, so I’m definitely going to be a little gun-shy with such updates in the future. It’s nice to see that System Restore worked so well, though I hope to not have a need for it on a regular basis.