Nobody likes to get a blue screen with an error that they don’t know where it comes from. Fortunately, BSODs are designed precisely to tell us what is failing, or at least where the shots are going. If your PC has random blue screens and you receive the Driver Power State Failure error, we will tell you what you should do to fix it .
If the error you receive is exactly “Driver Power State Failure” you should not worry, because the solution is very simple. There are two potential reasons why this error can appear randomly while you are using the PC, and fortunately both cases have a solution so we will proceed to 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 comes from a driver or the power supply, and in both cases you could be right, at least approximately.
Windows gives this error when the system tries to activate a specific device driver and it is not responding . This usually occurs 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, it is generally a driver problem although it can be mixed with incompatible hardware, such as trying to put an SSD that is not compatible with DevSleep to sleep . In any case and regardless of the cause, below we are going to tell you what you should do to solve it.
Find the culprit of Driver Power State Failure error
In order to identify the root cause of the Driver Power State Failure error it is always a good idea to start by disconnecting any external hardware, especially hard drives with a USB connection. Start the PC and check if you still have the problem, because if not, you already have the culprit located quickly. Go connecting 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 guilty of the BSOD, right-click on it and choose the “Uninstall” option.
Once done, restart the computer again and let Windows reinstall the device automatically. If you still have 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 the device manager, right-click on the device, and instead of uninstalling it, click Update driver and follow the wizard to make Windows try again.
Errors in device manager
If you are able to start the PC in a normal way (as we have explained in the previous point), do so. But it may also be that the fault is not an external device but an internal one or that you cannot locate the culprit, so if the PC does not start you must do it in Safe Mode , since this avoids the Driver Power State Failure error since drivers are not loading.
Once done, open the device manager again and look for those that have a red X or a yellow exclamation mark (you must go through all the categories for this), since this indicates that there is a problem with them. Right-click on the device in question and select the option to update drivers. If this does not work, uninstall the device as we showed you in the previous point.
You can then either restart the PC or press the button on the bar that says “Check for hardware changes”; in both cases the system will try to reinstall the driver again.
If after doing this you continue to have the same problem, look for the appropriate drivers on the website of the manufacturer of the affected device and install them. If you have started having this BSOD after installing new hardware on your computer, potentially there you will be the culprit.
Adjust the power plan
Especially if you have a laptop, you probably have a tight power plan to optimize battery use. This is good most of the time, but it can cause the BSOD Driver Power State Failure in some cases. Instead of allowing Windows to “wake up” the device as it should, if the system cuts the power it can result in a fatal error for the driver, causing the aforementioned BSOD.
Although adjusting the power plan can cause your laptop to consume more battery (although it is also valid for a desktop PC), to avoid this error the best thing you can do is select the “balanced” plan by default in Windows. To do this, access the power options (click on Start and type “Edit power plan”) and then click on “Restore the default settings of this plan”.
If you want, you can also manually edit the power plan (giving the option above, “Change advanced power settings”) and manually modify how you want the equipment to behave. It is recommended to choose all the maximum performance options and avoid device suspend or hibernation options. Take special consideration when configuring this manually in the PCI-Express options, since 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 solved. If not, we recommend doing the reverse process of what you did in the previous step, that is, if you manually configured the settings, select the default ones and if you selected the default, modify them manually.
In any case, it is most likely that by applying one or more of these methods that we have told you, you will finally be able to get rid of these tedious blue screens.