HP Probook 450 G4 - Win 10 - solution for black screen when idle

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Update 2022: Even after a fresh Win10 reinstall and upgrade to latest Bios the problem is still there.

A way to avoid laptop blocking when idle is to disable both Sleep and Screen turn off - on "Power and Sleep" menu. Just set them all to Never, for battery and plugged in.

You can set the power button and lid close to do Hibernate when you stop working, so you can save some power and heat and resume your work fast enough even without the Sleep function. You just hit the power button briefly before leaving. You might want to disable “Require sign-in” after sleep.

If you still want some automatic power saving, you can enable Hibernate after like 30minutes from the Advanced power options. In order to have Hibernate available you must disable the "Hybrid sleep" in the same Sleep sub-menu.

Note to self: I will not buy or recommend HP laptops in the future. I never had so many problems with a laptop. If you are still stuck with your HP laptop, I hope these advises will help you. 

 

Update March 2020: something was "upgraded" (Bios, Win10?) and the below fix does not hold anymore. I found out that setting a lower sleep timeout makes the "freeze with black screen" problem to disappear. Probably a component (SATA, Video card?) was entering sleep before the system's sleep timeout and it was not able to wake up. When full system sleeps earlier, it can also wake up correctly.


For example:

• Turn off the display =10min
• Put the computer to sleep = 1h

From Power Options -> Change when the computer sleeps -> Plugged In

I tried BIOS downgrade to the initial version by it did not help. If you still want to try, you can do this version-by-version from the "BIOS"(UEFI) directly. The BIOS is able to download each previous version from the network. Then you can upgrade again if you like.


Outdated below:

This is the solution I've found for laptop hangs/freezes randomly with black screen when idle, for HP Probook 450 G4. This "black screen of death" happens randomly after the laptop screen goes off when the computer is idle. This is similar, however different than "computer not going back from sleep mode". Also, when this happens, the computer is really dead (not just a display issue).


Symptoms:
- the computer works well when used, but hangs forever after being unused for a while
- the hang happens immediately or after couple of minutes after it goes black screen after the "Turn off the display" period
- when pressing keyboards or mouse buttons, the screen remains black
- the power led and the wireless/speaker buttons lights are ON - unlike the sleep mode when power led  flashes and the other lights are off
- the cooler continues to spin like the CPU is active, with no noticeable variations in it's rate
- the computer does not respond to network ping anymore, even on wired connection
- no sign of response for any keyboard or mouse move, not even in cooler rate
- the only solution for this hang is to forcefully power off the laptop by pressing long the power button for seconds

Solution: 
Open "Intel Rapid Storage Technology" from programs. Go to "Performance menu". Disable SATA power management by clicking the "Disable" link, to obtain "Link Power Management: Disabled". Close all windows and reboot the computer.

This program comes with the "Intel Rapid Storage Technology" driver. You might need to install the driver from the HP page for probook-450-g4, if you didn't do it already. You can find it in the Drive-Storage section. Not sure if the Intel's IRST version works the same.

The problem should be solved after restart. You can faster check this by setting a small timeout for "Turn off the display", like 1 minute. You can reproduce the issue again by re-enabling the "Link Power Management: Enabled" and waiting for the screen to go off and waiting some minutes. The hang happens more often when you have programs opens, like a browser with many tags.

I hope it will help people having this problem, I spent days to debug it. You might also like my non-technical articles that are the main subject of this blog. Feel free to share :)

If the above solution does not work

The issue on your "HP Probook 450 G4" laptop might be different, or the solution needs another piece of change that I tried before finding this final solution. However, the problem seems to not depend on a specific version of other drivers of Bios. For me it works with the latest drivers from HP. If nothing will work, you can also find an ugly workaround at the end of the article.

Ideas for faster debugging:

The problem with this issue is that it's very hard to reproduce, so it's hard to decide when you actually found the right solution. Some ideas to test solutions faster.

1. Plug in the laptop. If the laptop is on battery you want it to sleep fast, and this problem happens before the laptop goes to sleep.
2. Set the "Turn off the display" to 1 minute, to faster reproduce the issue after each try: Right click on battery -> Power Options -> "Turn off the display". Do it on both sides, just to be sure.
3. Disable the sleep or set it to a very high value. Once the computer successfully sleeps, this problem might not manifest (not sure).
4. Keep a ping on your network address, to faster know when the issue reproduced (the ping will not respond anymore). You don't want to wake the computer too early and start to wait again for it to go idle.
5. Keep the wireless network on and a browser with many open tabs  (Firefox in my case). While the issue also happens without any open program and without network, for an unknown reason it reproduces faster when having a program that allocates a lot of memory then stays mostly idle.
6. Keep the mouse off or on a firm surface, you don't want to wake the computer by accidental move
7. Keep the laptop un-moved. Moving it might interfere with the HP 3D hard drive protection on shocks - a special HP feature that might actually be related with this issue.
8. Optional: Put the hard disk to go off after 3 minutes, setting 3 on: Right click on battery -> Power Options -> Change Plan Settings ->  Change Advanced Power Settings -> Turn off hard disk after -> Plugged in -> "3". Not sure if this really helps :)

Other solutions to try:
- It seems like HP did some platform changes that made some generic drivers from Intel or Microsoft to not work well. Try using the drivers from HP site: https://support.hp.com/ro-en/drivers/selfservice/hp-probook-450-g4-notebook-pc/10477253
- Try various "Management Engine" versions, both for "firmware" and "driver". It was reported that version 9.5 of the driver solves this issue, however I could not apply this downgrade on updated Win10. You can also try versions starting with 10.x. My fix works with the latest "Management Engine" firmware and driver from HP site (driver version 11.7.0.1057).

- I tested the fix with Bios 1.18 and 1.23. Do not upgrade/downgrade the Bios unless you know what you are doing. This is probably the only operation that can brick the laptop without recovery, unless you know how to write the old Bios directly on the motherboard (via electric wires). For me it worked over wired network from Bios menu, but keep in mind that it's very risky.

Additional notes
It seems that you can get rid of Video drivers from HP that are a little old. With the HP driver I had issues to import movies in Adobe Rush and Adobe Premiere. With the Intel driver for Intel-HD-Graphics-620 it works way better. Note that that Intel® Driver & Support Assistant is too shy to  replace the HP version, you need to run the installer yourself. You can also use the Nvidia driver searching for (your model my differ), like Nvidia GeForce 930MX.

Workaround if nothing works

If nothing works and you still want to keep the laptop on when not working, you can still disable sleep and display off, or set it to a high enough value. You might want to increase the sleep value. It might also work to disable screen of an set a smaller sleep value, however I never tried how this works.

To change the sleep/display-off:
- Right click on battery (right/below) -> Power Options -> Change when the computer sleeps

- For each configuration (On battery/Plugged in), you can select "Never" instead of the time period for both "Put the computer to sleep" and "Turn off the display". However, it's better to keep the sleep for Battery.

Note that with this setting, the computer display will stay on until you shutdown.

If you don't like it on all the time, you can also program the laptop to go to sleep (not hibernate!) when you close the lid. You can do this from the menu  Right click on battery -> Power Options -> "Choose what closing the lid does".

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This blog is mainly focused on my Philosophical and theoretical ideas. 

From time to time I have practical posts that are too few to deserve a blog by themselves. I still hope my other work (like above) is even more valuable than such practical article as below.

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See also https://meaningofstuff.blogspot.com/search/label/Mathematics

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