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I'm running Dropbox on my Windows 10 Home Edition. The computer is Acer Predator PH315-51. The problem is that Dropbox prevents my system from going to sleep (also hibernate) properly. As soon as I have the Dropbox desktop app installed, trying to put the laptop to sleep leaves it in a weird state that turns the display off but fans and keyboard lights stay on, and the only way to recover it from that state is to hard shut down it and lose all unsaved data and running apps and jeopardize corrupting the hard drives. When I uninstall Dropbox, the sleep problem goes away and comes back when I install Dropbox again, so I'm pretty sure Dropbox is the culprit. I found this post https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox-installs-integrations/Does-Dropbox-prevent-Windows-from-slee... but it claims dropbox does not do anything to prevent the computer from going to sleep which I'm having hard time to believe and my problem is quite opposite to the one in that post in the first place.
Any ideas what I could do to make sleep work and have Dropbox app installed at the same time? Thanks!
Jay
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
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Thanks @Jay for the reply.
The operating system is up-to-date. There are dozens of applications installed, and by uninstalling them one by one (first taking a backup image of the initial state, of course) I found that the uninstallation of Dropbox makes the problem go away, and reinstalling Dropbox brings it back. The sleep problem does not occur every time you put it in sleep, so this is still a little bit of speculation, but the change in probability is so significant with uninstalling/reinstalling Dropbox that I'm sure it has something to do with this. If Dropbox does not intentionally prevent sleeping, could it be that it produces network traffic or something that practically has the same effect?
I have been communicating about this with the laptop manufacturer as well for quite some time already and in fact I'm going to send the laptop to them for inspection right now, which means that I'll be unable to do any testing myself for the next few weeks. However, since I have not been able to reproduce the problem without Dropbox installed, I'm very sceptic them being able to find any problems in the hardware.
Jay
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
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Today the laptop came back from inspection. They did not find anything wrong with the hardware, the only thing they did was to update BIOS. As soon as I tested putting it to sleep mode, the problem reproduced again.
Do you happen to have any ideas on how to debug this or get information on what exactly causes it. In the event viewer logs I don't see anything that looks interesting to me, I'm not very experienced in reading them though.
Jay
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
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Sorry for the extended delay in my reply, I've been super busy. I now tried this advanced reinstall and it had no effect on the issue.
Even though DropBox being installed or not seems to have somewhat big impact on the probability of the problem occurring, I don't think it is necessarily the whole explanation. Do you happen to have any ideas on how I could get information on what exactly is going on when this happens, or what exactly is the weird state the laptop goes to? I believe that would help in understanding the problem and finding the actual cause.
Jay
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
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Absolutely.
Jay
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
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