My Acer notebook has recently developed a problem I don’t quite know what to do about. I have it set to go to sleep if I close the lid and I keep it near the TV viewing position, where I often refer to it for different things. When I open the lid and tap the touchpad, I get the screen I was last working on after a few seconds. This is how it has always behaved.

Now it has started doing something else. Often, though not every time, the screen appears but it is frozen. I can’t get any response to the touchpad, touch screen, keyboard, or anything else. I can hear the hard drive, which is still a mechanical one, going like crazy. It sounds like the heads are jumping all over the place. I have let this go for up to five minutes to see what would happen, but it seems to just keep endlessly seeking, or doing whatever it is doing. Finally, the only way I can get the computer back is to hold down the power button, which is the only thing it responds to. After shutting down it will boot back up normally and everything seems perfectly okay. There is no data loss or any other problem and everything works normally.

The only real problem with this is the annoyance of having to reboot, which takes longer than I would like. I would like to find out what is causing this, though. It never used to happen at all. Now it happens fairly often. I tried changing the power settings between sleep and hibernation but that makes no difference. Does anyone know what could be causing this? Is it yet another Windows 10 quirk?