HP Stream 7 power button does not sleep

I’ve got a HP Stream 7 that I’m using for a few things around the place. Nice little unit all up although could do with more RAM.

Recently I noticed that for some reason, when I hit the power button, I was expecting it to go into sleep mode, but instead it presented me with a shutdown screen instead.  I figured that something had gone amiss with the power settings, so I checked them out and they were set to sleep when the power button was pressed.  I even shutdown the unit and turned it back on.  I was at a loss to explain it.  I talked to one of the guys in the office and he too had seen the same thing on his Stream 7 without knowing what was going on.  End result is very simple.  Do a restart of the unit and the power button once again works as designed and puts it into sleep mode.

Why you ask?  Well the clue is in the details.  In the screen below you see that under Shutdown settings, it’s Enabled for Fast Startup.  This function means that when you shutdown the machine with Fast Startup enabled, it actually saves some information to a file during the shutdown phase which it then reads on startup to make the startup process MUCH faster.  The downside to this is that it can cause problems such as the one I’m seeing here now.

So the solution to restoring my power button to go into sleep mode is simple.  Do a RESTART of the HP Stream 7 and it’s now working fine.  A restart does not write the fast startup information to the file and instead relies on exactly what is loaded during the startup process.  Problem solved, and certainly something to watch out for when troubleshooting modern PCs.