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Dropbox prevents Windows from going to sleep?

iksa

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 ****** shut down it and lose all unsaved data and running apps and jeopardize corrupting the ****** 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-sleeping-or-going-idle/td-p/424195 but it claims dropbox does not do anything to prevent the computer from going to sleep which I'm having ****** 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!

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Jay

Hi @iksa, thanks for messaging today!

I can only reiterate what my message in that thread said, as it hasn't changed; when the Dropbox desktop application is installed, it doesn't prevent devices from sleeping.

If your computer isn't sleeping correctly, you might have another hardware or OS-related issue which is causing the behavior you're experiencing.

Have you updated your OS or firmware for the machine itself?

Keep me updated with any progress!

iksa

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

If the Dropbox desktop application is syncing files, even when it is placed into sleep/hibernation, the process would be paused and the app would act like all others, essentially shutting down for the duration.

If you find out any more information after the inspection, please let me know.

iksa

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

If you're not on a Dropbox Basic plan with more than 3 devices connected, have you tried an advanced reinstall of the app using the steps in this link?

iksa

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 ****** 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

To look into this matter further, would it be possible to contact you at the email associated with your forum profile?

iksa

Absolutely.

Jay

Thanks, I've sent you an email, please could you reply to it when you get a chance.

mooseboots

HI - I don't know whether or not this piece of information will help : I had the same problem using Dropbox on my linux OS (Ubuntu 22.04). Solved the issue by clicking on the Dropbox icon and selecting "Quit". No problems with powering off now.

I hope this helps.