Why does my Windows 7 computer freeze after waking up from Sleep?

I think the hard drives don't support Windows 7's new Power Management settings.

I'm getting regular Blue Screens of Happiness whenever I try to "wake up" my E-Sata external hard drive. I installed the newest Intel Raid drivers (which I hope contain some updated drivers) and it's better now, but still not perfect.

The default Power Management options in Windows 7 Beta turns off the Hard Disk after 20mins. This could cause problems when the PC comes out of sleep mode or hibernation. To work around the problem set the Power Options for the Hrd Disk to never turn off. To do this

1. Click Start – Control Panel – System and Security – Power Options
2. Click “Change Plan Settings” on the “Balanced (recomended)”
3. Click “Change Advanced power settings”
4. Under the “Turn Off Hard Disk after” option change the timing to “0″ which should set it to Never. Click Apply and OK.

Over at Lifehacker they have a post about this:

Windows only: Ever wonder why your laptop's battery seems to die too quickly? The Windows Help blog points out a hidden command-line switch that generates a report with loads of helpful troubleshooting information.

The report lists all of the devices that are causing problems with sleep mode, explains the different power saving modes your computer supports, and even gives you detailed information on your battery—invaluable information when your system takes forever to go in and out of sleep mode. Generating the report is easy enough—just open up a command prompt in administrator mode using the context menu -> Run as Administrator option, and then type in the following:

powercfg -ENERGY The utility will take a while to generate the report, sometimes more than the 60 seconds it quotes you—but when it finishes you can open up the generated file in your favorite web browser. Once you've examined the report, you can figure out if you need to do some tweaking or update a driver.

Somebody else also suggested updating the DirectX drivers, though I have no idea what that has to do with sleep mode...

It seems that the solution to this, in my case, was simply to setup a screen saver, haha. Ever since I set one up, I have not experienced this problem. Hopefully, I imagine this has been fixed in the final release (RTM) but for the release candidate, setting a screensaver works just great.