If the error you receive is exactly “Driver Power State Failure”, don’t worry because the solution is very simple. There are two potential reasons why this error might appear randomly while you are using the PC, and luckily both cases have a solution, so we’ll tell you which one it is.
Causes of Driver Power State Failure Error
Already by the name of the error you already have an idea that the problem is with a driver or with the power supply, and in either case you could be right, at least approximately.
Windows gives this error when the system tries to activate a specific device driver and it he does not answer. This usually happens when starting, restarting, or waking the PC from sleep mode, but it can also happen if the device is in use and the driver suddenly stops responding.
As you can imagine, this is usually a problem with controller although it can be mixed with incompatible material, such as trying to put a SSD that does not support DevSleep. In any case and whatever the cause, below we will tell you what you need to do to fix it.
Find the culprit for the driver power state failure error
In order to identify the root cause Driver power state failure error It is always a good idea to unplug any external hardware first, especially hard drives with a USB connection. Start the PC and check if you still have the problem because if not then you have already located the culprit quickly. Go connect the external devices one by one to locate the culprit, and when you locate it, disconnect it and restart the PC so that the system can boot normally.
Once Windows has started, connect the device. Then right click on the Start button and click on Device Manager. Find the device responsible for the BSOD, right click on it and choose the “Uninstall” option.
When done, restart the computer and let Windows reinstall the device automatically. If you still encounter the same error, visit the manufacturer’s website to download the latest driver and follow their instructions to install it. If you can’t, go back to Device Manager, right-click the device, and instead of uninstalling it, click Update Driver and follow the wizard to have Windows try again.
Errors in Device Manager
If you manage to start the PC in the normal way (as we explained in the previous point), do so. But it could also happen that the fault is not an external device but an internal device or you cannot locate the culprit, so if the PC does not start, you have to do it in Safe mode, because it avoids the driver power state failure error because the drivers are not loaded.
Once done, open Device Manager again and look for those that have a red X or yellow exclamation mark (you will need to show all categories for that), as that indicates there is a problem with them. . Right click on the device in question and select the Update Drivers option. If that doesn’t work, uninstall the device as we showed you in the previous point.
You can then restart the PC or press the button on the bar that says “Check for hardware changes”; in either case, the system will attempt to reinstall the driver.
If after doing this you continue to have the same problem, find the correct drivers on the website of the manufacturer of the affected device and install them. If you started getting this BSOD after installing new hardware on your computer, you will potentially be the culprit.
Adjust the diet plan
Especially if you have a laptop, you probably have a tight power plan to optimize battery usage. This is fine most of the time, but it can cause the BSOD driver power state to crash in some cases. Instead of allowing Windows to “wake up” the device as it should, if the system cuts off the power, it may result in a fatal error for the driver, causing the aforementioned BSOD.
Although adjusting the power plan may cause your laptop to consume more battery (although this also applies to a desktop computer), to avoid this error the best thing to do is to select the “balanced” plan by default in Windows. To do this, go to the power options (click on Start and type “Change the power plan”) then click on “Restore the default settings of this plan”.
If desired, you can also manually change the power plan (giving the above option, “Change advanced power settings”) and manually change the desired behavior of the equipment. It is recommended that you choose all the maximum performance options and avoid the options to suspend or hibernate the device. Take special consideration when configuring this manually in PCI-Express options, as they usually have a lot to do with this BSOD that we are dealing with here.
Restart the computer and see if the problem has been resolved. Otherwise, we recommend that you perform the reverse process of what you did in the previous step, i.e. if you have manually configured the settings, select the defaults and if you have selected the value by default, change them manually.
In any case, it is very likely that by applying one or more of these methods that we have described to you, you will finally be able to get rid of those tiresome blue screens.
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