Fingerprint reader doesn't wake up when resuming from hibernate: power management won't allow it to remain on

johnlgalt · Mar 11, 2023

Fiveish said:
Plus, as the OP stated and I can confirm, this problem has existed off and on prior to W11.

deepskydiver said:
I can confirm that it was solved using johngalt's suggestion: Creating a new power plan from scratch allowed me to use my fingerprint reader when waking from hibernate.

It is probably because Lenovo (and many other OEMs) install their own power plans on their systems (especially portable ones) and sometimes things get wonky.

They have a setting in there, or parameter, or whatever, that works in certain ways based upon the parameters in their BIOS - but if you change something, it breaks. Or, if the BIOS gets updated to a newer version, with differences from the previous, but the Power plan installed by them does not, then there is now a mismatch, and things stop playing nicely.

Since he was able to get the original problem solved with a custom power plan, I'm pretty sure we can say it is not a Windows problem.

Fiveish · Mar 12, 2023

johnlgalt said:
It is probably because Lenovo (and many other OEMs) install their own power plans on their systems (especially portable ones) and sometimes things get wonky.

They have a setting in there, or parameter, or whatever, that works in certain ways based upon the parameters in their BIOS - but if you change something, it breaks. Or, if the BIOS gets updated to a newer version, with differences from the previous, but the Power plan installed by them does not, then there is now a mismatch, and things stop playing nicely.

Since he was able to get the original problem solved with a custom power plan, I'm pretty sure we can say it is not a Windows problem.

So an update. My custom power plan discharged my battery rapidly overnight (I think I forgot to turn off wake timers on battery power) and hibernated (had about 10% charge). Restarted it and the "turn off this device to save power" was rechecked yet again. Not really sure about to do with this. As long as it stays asleep it will save the setting, but when it shuts town/hibernates it resets. Since there is no BIOS setting as far as I can tell, I'm guessing my only option would be to run a custom script on startup?

johnlgalt · Mar 13, 2023

Hmmm. That might be the best way to go about it, but it is weird that both a power cycle and hibernate are causing the issue to have that setting get re-enabled.

Does the FP reader have any sort of program to help adjust settings for it? Perhaps there is something buried in there that turns that features back on (maybe even obfuscated as a 'save power' setting?)

Fiveish · Mar 13, 2023

johnlgalt said:
Hmmm. That might be the best way to go about it, but it is weird that both a power cycle and hibernate are causing the issue to have that setting get re-enabled.

Does the FP reader have any sort of program to help adjust settings for it? Perhaps there is something buried in there that turns that features back on (maybe even obfuscated as a 'save power' setting?)

Unfortunately no. I can't even find the associated service for it since I was going to try stopping and restarting it.

johnlgalt · Mar 13, 2023

Have you considered disabling sleep timeouts for all USB items in Device Manager? Long shot for sure, but I wonder if that may be overriding the setting upon hibernation . reboot?

Or, actually, you might need to check in Group Policy for the machine, that might be where the customization from the OEM is written in order to always have it 'their' way.

Apologies if you've already done either / both of these.... I'm kinda spitballing ideas here....

Fiveish · Mar 14, 2023

johnlgalt said:
Have you considered disabling sleep timeouts for all USB items in Device Manager? Long shot for sure, but I wonder if that may be overriding the setting upon hibernation . reboot?

Or, actually, you might need to check in Group Policy for the machine, that might be where the customization from the OEM is written in order to always have it 'their' way.

Apologies if you've already done either / both of these.... I'm kinda spitballing ideas here....

I'll give that a try, but my guess it that it will reset on boot like most of the other power settings. I'm also going to take another look at the BIOS. I'll look into the group policy as well.

Fiveish · Mar 18, 2023

apparently there's no gpedit.msc file on my device.

Fiveish · Mar 18, 2023

Also, with regard to the other suggestions:
1. Set BIOS power profile to performance (in case it was overriding my settings)--no change
2. I changed power settings USB in device manager and it does not reset the power management settings there. My BIOS settings have "always on usb" set on by default.
I'm beginning to think this is an issue specifically with the Synaptics SGX compliant Fingerprint reader and its driver. Something is specifically controlling the power profile for it and allowing it to be turned off to conserve power.