Driver Setting Explains Venue Pro Restart Fail
Over the past 2-3 years, I’ve experienced an intermittent and vexing issue with one of my Insider Pro test machines. It’s a Dell Venue Pro 11, model 7130 (i5-4210Y CPU, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB Lite-On M.2 SATA SSD). At certain points in time, this PC has repeated suffered from Restart issues. Let me explain: if I choose Restart from the power menu, or the command line, the machine shuts down. But it stays shut down. And I have to disconnect the battery and/or AC so a cold boot occurs, before the PC will start up after pressing the Power button. At long last, I’ve determined that a driver setting explains Venue Pro restart fail. The culprit, it turns out, is an Intel Management Engine (IME) setting. . .
On all PCs, this setting is checked by default. But on some laptops, including this one, it causes sleep, restart, and hibernation issues.
When Driver Setting Explains Venue Pro Restart Fail, the Fix is Simple
All that’s needed to address this problem is to uncheck the setting. Sure, the device may consume more power. But on those laptops (or hybrid tablets in this case) that experience restart and other problems related to sleep and hibernation, it seems to fix what ails them. It sure worked on this PC.
I didn’t really get to the bottom of this until I recently clean-installed Insider Preview build 18317 on the Venue Pro 11. Magically, the restart problem disappeared. The cause didn’t come clear until the problem returned after I visited the Dell Drivers & Support webpage and updated the drivers that the Windows Installer used with the latest and greatest from that source. Presto! My Restart failure re-appeared. One of those drivers had to be at fault, so I started removing them one at a time. In retrospect, I now understand that each time a new IME driver got installed, the default was reset and my problems resumed. Thus, I’ve got a new item for that machine’s post-IME-update checklist! Funny how some things that seem really complex turn out to be fairly simple when better understood.
When I removed the IME driver, Restart resumed working. Thanks to some insightful input from my Win10.Guru partner, Kari Finn, the solution was then clear. In a TenForums.com thread about earlier Insider Preview releases, he gets right to the heart of this matter. Indeed, after re-installing the IME driver, and making this setting change, Restart kept working properly. Problem solved!
His illustration of the fix is quite instructive, so I’ll end my post with a copy of it here: