[metallicamaster3]

Just received my TravelMate P645 today. It is the 1080p model with the dedicated HD 8750M graphics card and 8GB of RAM. So far so good, I'm really enjoying the laptop. However, the computer came with both Windows 7 and Windows 8 abilities but Windows 7 came stock. I decided to use my own Windows 8 install instead of the image that was provided on the drive.

I installed every driver that was listed under the Windows 8 option on the Acer Support website. All the components are working and as far as I can tell so is the GPU switching. However, a few things are NOT working:

There is an item in Device Manager that is not properly installed. It is listed as "PCI Device". I have no idea what device it is referring to, but I have installed all drivers already so I don't know what else it could be.

I do not know if it is related, but the machine will not wake up from sleep. When closing the lid or telling the computer to go to sleep, it will go to sleep just fine and the LED will blink red like it should. However, as soon as you try to wake the computer up, either by opening the lid or pressing the power button, the computer just stays blank (lights turn blue like it's trying to wake up) for about 20-25 seconds before the computer just reboots entirely. You can see why this would be incredibly inconvenient.

Please let me know what is missing! The "Recovery" partition on my solid state drive no longer exists so I cannot just "reinstall" the Acer Windows 8 image.

 

[deepor]

That unknown device might be the "Intel Management Engine Interface". To check what it is exactly, you can open the Properties window of that device, go to the Details tab, then select "Hardware IDs". You will see a weird string that's built out of snippets split through & symbols. Put some of those snippets into a web search and you'll find out hints about what it is.

Perhaps you can see if Windows finds a driver by itself online if you select the "update driver software" option in the right-click menu of the device manager?

You should try to avoid installing the whole "Intel Management Engine" stuff just to fix that unknown device. It will add several services and you don't need those at all at home. They are things that enable remote administration stuff for updating machines in an office over night etc. I don't remember how I got to the device driver inside that large install package.

About standby and hibernate:

I had hibernate and standby problems on my desktop PC. Those were fixed by updating the "Intel INF" drivers, I'm pretty sure. You should try to hunt down a newer version of those than what you get on Acer's website. I think my problems were similar to yours. The PC went to sleep, but would not wake up, instead apparently crash and then do the normal boot.

When installing the INF drivers, you might want to try starting it through the command line and adding the command line parameters "-overall" and "-overwrite". Here's a screenshot with a description of what those do:

 

[metallicamaster3]

Quote:

Originally Posted by deepor

That unknown device might be the "Intel Management Engine Interface". To check what it is exactly, you can open the Properties window of that device, go to the Details tab, then select "Hardware IDs". You will see a weird string that's built out of snippets split through & symbols. Put some of those snippets into a web search and you'll find out hints about what it is.

Perhaps you can see if Windows finds a driver by itself online if you select the "update driver software" option in the right-click menu of the device manager?

You should try to avoid installing the whole "Intel Management Engine" stuff just to fix that unknown device. It will add several services and you don't need those at all at home. They are things that enable remote administration stuff for updating machines in an office over night etc. I don't remember how I got to the device driver inside that large install package.

About standby and hibernate:

I had hibernate and standby problems on my desktop PC. Those were fixed by updating the "Intel INF" drivers, I'm pretty sure. You should try to hunt down a newer version of those than what you get on Acer's website. I think my problems were similar to yours. The PC went to sleep, but would not wake up, instead apparently crash and then do the normal boot.

When installing the INF drivers, you might want to try starting it through the command line and adding the command line parameters "-overall" and "-overwrite". Here's a screenshot with a description of what those do:

Thanks for the tip on the Hardware IDs. The missing driver was for my SD card reader. Funnily enough, the Acer-provided driver for Windows 8 did not work even though the driver device matched. It was a "Realtek SD Card Reader", and after googling the hardware IDs a driver for Windows 8 popped up from an HP machine, which worked. Cheers there.

However, it did not fix my standby problems. I did run the Intel Driver Update utility, which told me my ethernet and WLAN drivers were out of date. After updating those, no change.

I'm starting to think that it's video-related. Every so often, when trying to boot I'll get a BSOD (or the sadface-of-death) noting "VIDEO_DXGKRNL_FATAL_ERROR", which is a dead giveaway that something's astray with the GPU configurations.

 

[metallicamaster3]

Went ahead and played with my graphics drivers. After going through about three different ones from AMD, the last Mobility set of drivers finally took. After rebooting, sleep and hibernate are now working! I was also able to confirm that switchable graphics are also working.

 

[metallicamaster3]

Nope. Sleep still isn't working. Even reinstalled using UEFI instead of Legacy, thinking that would help, but it didn't.

Have been playing with drivers all week, nothing's working. About to send it back to Newegg for a refund.

 

[deepor]

Did you write Acer support a mail to ask if there's something special you have to do so that it works? Even if it's a useless customer support answering your mail, they might have an internal document from one of the dudes that set up the Windows installation originally.

If you can't get it fixed, you should really send it back in my opinion. I feel standby is a pretty important feature for a notebook. If you work on something serious on battery, have a billion windows open or run something that won't complete for hours, you need sleep so that you won't have to use shutdown if battery goes empty.

 

[stevey500]

Was there any answer for this issue?

It seems Acer has addressed this but I myself still have the same problem.
http://acer.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/32681/~/black-screen-or-unable-to-enter-to-sleep-mode-after-windows-8.1-update

Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 will NOT sleep, other than that, everything functions perfectly.

Windows 7 - Everthing functions perfectly.

I have come to find out that if you disable Wireless LAN and Wired LAN in Bios, the sytem will sleep and wake PERFECTLY. But, I've also realized that the AMD 8750 seems to control the PCIe devices- so somehow there is a conflict here and it seems to be cause directly by the 8750AMD driver.

Wether I install ALL drivers from the P645 MG Acer download page for windows8.1 or hunt for all of the drivers manually direct from hardware manufactures, it still will not sleep. I read that there are other laptops out there with this exact same configuration, what have they done to resolve this issue?