Dell Latitude E6400: Hibernate Not Working (Windows XP)
At work, my employer provided me with a Dell Latitude E6400 laptop. While I do actually like the machine in general (despite it’s running Windows most of the time…), it had one very disturbing issue: from the very first day since I got it, the laptop suffered from Windows insomnia.
I was neither able to put it into standby nor hibernation mode successfully. When I tried to do so, I was logged out of Windows and greeted with the “Preparing to Standby/Hibernate…” dialog that just never disappeared.
It turned out I was not the only one experiencing that problem. Last week, I finally got the hint that led to the solution: Another Dell user found out that reverting the Dell Webcam driver to the previous version solved the issue. I can confirm: this worked for me, too. Finally!
Update: I just learned that there are users who have the same problem with the Dell Latitude E6500 laptop, although they are trying other approaches to solve the problem.
Update 2: I was also experiencing a problem with the CPU running at ~100 Mhz, so my E6400 was replaced after 3 days of usage way back in April this year. It seems that Dell is now admitting the issue: they released a BIOS update to solve that strange behavior.