HP Omen 30L / Windows 11 won't sleep correctly

[chmillman]

Brand new Omen 30L bought directly from HP store (Switzerland).  Came with Windows 10, but I opted to update to Windows 11 right away before anything was installed.  I therefore did not test to see if these symptoms existed when it was still on windows 10.  In installing Windows 11, it also prompted me to update the BIOS, which I did.  The only things that are currently connected to the computer are the wired keyboard and mouse (both HP standard, came with the computer), plus a 4K monitor.  The computer is connected to my router via WIFI.

Problem 1: if I choose "Sleep" from the Windows start button, the screen goes black for about one second and then comes back up.  Sometimes if I do this multiple times it will actually go to sleep. I cannot reliably put the computer to sleep this way. It does sleep *correctly* (see Problem 2) if I press the power button on the box, it also appears to do so more or less correctly if it hits the sleep time delay without any activity.

I have disabled all wake timers in power options and in device manager all things that could be allowed wake the computer have had the box "allow this device to wake the computer" unchecked, except the keyboard.  It does the same thing if I have the WIFI enabled or not.

If I set the timers in Power options, then it does go to sleep automatically if I do not touch the computer during the time period.  However, it doesn't really stay that way - at least I'm not sure - see further.

Problem 2: In the Omen control center under lighting I turned off the annoying rainbow Hyper-X lights (zone 4), left everything else on. The NVidia RTX 3070 graphics card also has a GEFORCE RTX lighted logo which is on.  If the computer is put into  sleep mode via the button, all the lights go off except for the Geforce logo on the graphics card which stays lit, and the diamond light on the front panel flashes.  If it goes to sleep via the sleep timers, the Geforce logo also goes out - already odd, because it should do the same thing.

However, after 5 minutes or so, I hear one of the fans "rrr" for a second like it turned on and then off again.  It will do this about every 5 minutes continuously.  However, if I leave it for a longer period of time - say a half hour - suddenly the Hyper-X lights come on for some reason, the Geforce logo lights up and I hear one of the fans start.  The front diamond light is still flashing and the monitor is off.  If I wake the computer by pressing the keyboard spacebar, the screen comes up instantly - which makes me believe that at this point it partially woke up, it was no longer really sleeping, but just the screen was off. 

Another odd symptom, the interior lights do not always come back on when waking the computer.

Addendum:  after observing this behavior for awhile, I note that after the Hyper-X and Geforce lights have been on for about 5 minutes, they turn off again, and the fan stops.  It goes back to the behavior as before - every 5 minutes a fan goes "rrr".  Then in a half an hour or so, the cycle repeats itself.

None of this is life-threatening, it just seems to me that the Omen control center is pretty buggy (perhaps in combination with Windows 11).  I am considering disabling it altogether, but then I guess I would lose the lights altogether - I do like the front panel display and the interior general lighting is also OK without the Hyper-X.  Note that I do not do any gaming with this computer, simply that gaming models are the best value for the money for my 3D CAD application which likes fast processors, top of the line graphics cards and lots of RAM.

[WAWood]

@chmillman 

In my experience sleep/hibernate issues are nearly always caused by display drivers.

I run Win10 and Win 11 on several desktops and have not noticed any difference in the display drivers between the two OS versions; in fact, most driver providers list the drivers as Windows 10-11, indicating they will work on both.

But I note that you are using a 4K monitor, which can present issues for some display drivers.

If you have a spare HD monitor (1920x-1080) I would try hooking that up instead and seeing if it makes a difference.  If it does not, then I don't know what else to tell you.  If it does, then you need to consider contacting HP and complaining bitterly about the issue and seeing what they will do about is.

Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do for you about this from here.

[chmillman]

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@WAWood wrote:

@chmillman 

In my experience sleep/hibernate issues are nearly always caused by display drivers.

I run Win10 and Win 11 on several desktops and have not noticed any difference in the display drivers between the two OS versions; in fact, most driver providers list the drivers as Windows 10-11, indicating they will work on both.

But I note that you are using a 4K monitor, which can present issues for some display drivers.

If you have a spare HD monitor (1920x-1080) I would try hooking that up instead and seeing if it makes a difference.  If it does not, then I don't know what else to tell you.  If it does, then you need to consider contacting HP and complaining bitterly about the issue and seeing what they will do about is.

Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do for you about this from here.

---

The card in the machine is an NVidia 3070 with 8Gb of VRAM - i.e. a high-end card.  It is perfectly capable of driving one or even two 4K monitors.  The NVidia drivers (the latest were installed) are normally no problem and I have never had a problem with display drivers causing sleep problems on any of my other machines.

I have contacted HP and their support staff was not able to do anything, even resetting the machine to dead stock Windows 10 did not solve the problem.  The machine is now back in the box, and I am waiting on HP to make me an offer on a new machine - as the original ones are no longer in stock, so an exchange cannot be made.  But HP sales here is just not very speedy, it takes sometimes two days to get a response and that could be "I need to check with my superior on this", thank you for your patience."

IMO, it is the HP Omen Gaming Center that is buggy and I have my doubts that a new machine will fix the problem as it will have the same software.  But I don't have much choice here, I need to test one before getting a refund.  If it has the same problem, it is bye bye HP - I have had good experiences with my HP EliteBook laptops in the past, but this is the first "consumer" desktop I have bought and I am not impressed so far.

[chmillman]

So, I got my replacement machine yesterday - a slightly more powerful machine, same case, just an RTX 3080 with 10 Gb RAM instead of the 3070/8Gb, and an i9 instead of the i7 - they didn't have any of the older models left so they sold this one to me at a sizeable discount due to all the trouble with the previous one (thanks!).

This one came with Win11 already installed, so no upgrade from Win 10 was necessary.  So I did all the preliminary setup of the machine, and then without installing ANYTHING ELSE, I proceeded to test the machine.  Guess what - same general problem - the machine will reliably not stay asleep with keyboard, mouse and network cable plugged in.  This time I have not yet gone into the device manager to stop anything from automatically waking up the machine, I wanted to see how it behaved out of the box.

So, to be absolutely thorough, when the machine was booted, I pulled out the keyboard and mouse cables and disconnected the network cable.  It can't go on WIFI as I have not yet told it which network to use nor entered the password.  So the computer is now completely isolated from external influences.  The only cables connected to the box are the power cable and the display port cable to the monitor.  I then pressed the power button to sleep the machine.

Well, that way, it stays asleep - sorta.  Been 'asleep' for several hours now without waking up.  So that's encouraging, but now check this:  PRECISELY every 3.00 minutes (to the fraction of a second) the logo light on the RTX card flashes and the rear fan makes about one turn (total about 1 second).  Then all goes black again.  And it does this constantly every 3.00 minutes to the second for all the time it is sleeping - I timed it for at least 10 'laps" with my smartphone timer.

So this 'impulse' is not random in any way.  It's programmed in somewhere at exactly 180 seconds.  What the heck is that all about????

This in itself is not a problem, as it doesn't actually wake the machine, but it is indicative that there is something going on behind the scenes that is not programmed correctly.  Tomorrow, I will start testing connecting the network and mouse/keyboard to see what happens with each.  With the old machine I was not able to prevent them from waking up the machine no matter what I did in device manager, we'll see if this is still the case.

[ChristKnight]

Omen 30L sleep and wake problems here too. Sleeping feels random. Biggest problem was it did not sleep as deeply as desired. Would like a full S3 no fans on ultra low power state. But when it sleeps long enough (white heartbeat) I cannot wake it up, not with mouse, keyboard, nor power button. Have to physically unplug and plug back in.

When contacting HP Support, the biggest revelation from them was the concept of

Modern Standby

Slowly introduced around 8 or 10. Modern standby is a low power S0 idel state (lighter sleep than S3) that allows for "Instant On" experience and for "Background Activity" where network activity and some background tasks are still active. But here's where it impacts our weird sleeping and wakup problems:

For S3 systems, the system is either active or in S3. For Modern Standby, the transition from the active to the low power state is a series of steps to lower power consumption. Components are powered down when they are not in use. So, the transition into and out of a lower power state is much quicker on a Modern Standby system than on an S3 system. This design also helps with the speed of entry and exit from Standby as it doesn’t require firmware interactions.

This means after telling PC to "sleep" when screens turn off and fans are still on, it is because the system has only stepped one power transition down. And why it takes 20 or 30 minutes for your Omen PC to finally turn off all fans and lights except for the white diamond heartbeat.

Conclusion
So I don't have many answers. My HP Hana 8876 motherboard likely does not support S3 sleep at all, instead delivering the "Instand On" experience of S0 with Modern Standby. Maybe HP Omen Desktop buyers are largely crypto miners or 20 hour game streamers. HP Support found some Optional keyboard and mouse drivers to install, that may help with waking from deep sleep but I have not seen it sleep that deep since (likely because I had messed with my power related Windows registry settings too much).

Here are a few handy things you can do to explore. Open a command prompt (Start button -> "cmd") and run the powercfg tool to see hardware supported sleep states and power schemes.

Available sleep states

powercfg /a

(mine only lists one available state "Standby (S0 Low Power Idle) Network Disconnected")

List all power schemes

powercfg /l

 (also only one scheme "Balanced")

[chmillman]

Well, finally my solution was to send the computer back to HP.  Twice.  First tech support here said they had never seen this before, so they sent me a replacement, of course the second one did exactly the same thing.  After that I sent it back in for a full refund.  Ordered a custom-made (non-HP) unit here with OEM Windows 11and it's fine, sleeps completely normally. 

Lost about a week's time fiddling around with this stuff to generate error reports and to try and figure out why it worked like that.  Techs here had no idea what the cause was, but I did get an HP support person in the US who had a lot of experience and basically said, yep, that's the way they were designed, it's locked into the BIOS, if you wanted a machine that would sleep normally, you shouldn't have bought this machine.

So, yeah, adios HP, I am disappointed because I liked the design and build quality of the unit, but a computer is not only the sum of its hardware, it's also the way the manufacturer sets up the OS.