Windows XP forum: Dell won't wake up

If you research "XP WON'T SHUTDOWN" you discover thousands of posts and maybe 10 times that advice on a cure.

Since this sounds like the usual problem we rarely try to fix it today as the clients don't want to pay for OS REPAIR so we backup what files they want to save then reinstall the OS. If that doesn't cure (does better than 1/2 the time) then it's the hardware and given the age of the PC, few fix that.
Bob

If Start, Shut Down works. Again there are many reasons for this failure but I find many folk are put off by the lack of diagnostics on the issue. Or rather "You're kidding me" as you go over how we find a cure.
Bob

I looked and "hibernation" is checked in power options of the control panel. The problem first started when you'd let the computer go into sleep mode on it's own by not doing anything at all when finished using the computer. Then when you'd try to power up again later by moving the mouse or tapping the space bar the computer would sound like it was trying to start up but couldn't and the monitor screen stays black. The noise the tower makes when this is happening is much more drawn out or slower. Then At first I found that if we manually hibernated with the start button you could wake it up most times by just pushing the power button on the tower. Over a period of a few months that does not work most times anymore. So now I've been telling everyone in the house to just manually shut it down with the start button every time your done and when you do this it always restarts without a problem. The problem is the are 3 kids 8-12 years old in the house and they don't always remember to do this so invariably we end up doing a manual power shut down hold holding the button in on the tower for about 10 seconds and restarting it using the same button but Ive been told this is not a good thing to do especially as often as it seems to happen. The other thing is when I end up having to do this I'm really not sure of how my kids have ended their last session on the computer and when asked about it they don't remember what they did. I did increase the times for standby to 1 hr. and hibernation to 2 hrs. to alleviate some of the problem of the kids not remembering to power down but it's just a band-aid to the wound. I'm just looking for ideas to correct it but I'm no computer expert so layman's would be appreciated. Thanks greatly for any info/ideas.