Sunday January 4
14:54
Driving Me Nuts
I have a strange issue with my new PC which is driving me crazy, so I’m opening this up for help.
What happens is this: When I switch off the monitor, the computer keeps working for a few minutes and then suddenly “half stops”. When I switch back on the monitor, I can’t get the desktop back.
For example, if I am copying files from the local HDD to a network drive (NAS) and then switch off the monitor, the copying continues. However after a few minutes, the HDD light stops flashing, and when I switch back on the monitor, I can’t get back the desktop (no signal from the PC, no reaction to keyboard/mouse, reconnecting the monitor doesn’t help).
I know the computer is not sleeping or in hibernation because I can hear the fans working. I know it isn’t an HDMI issue, because that wouldn’t stop the activity on the PC – and I have tried with VGA. And if I don’t switch off the monitor, I don’t get this issue – so it has to be related to the monitor being switched off.
I’ve tried everything I can think of to get this working, but nothing seems to make a difference. I also can’t seem to find any connection between various settings and how long it takes for this to happen.
- Used HDMI and VGA connectors
- Reinstalled graphics drivers
- Looked at BIOS settings (nothing strange; BIOS is uptodate)
- Changed power options (no display or hdd sleep; no power management for pci)
- Set “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power” to OFF for the network card
- Reinstalled Vista several times
- Disabling ATI External Event Utility
With the external monitor switched on, everything works fine. Why should switching off the external monitor cause an issue? Does that trigger something within Vista?
I’m stumped. Any ideas? Just when I think I have something that works, suddenly it stops working again. It’s driving me nuts!
Asus M3A78-EM motherboard, Vista 64-bit Home Premium, Iiyama ProLite E2607WS 26″ Widescreen LCD.
I can’t reproduce this on my laptop since my laptop display never seems to sleep.
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Nikon D700
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Nikon D90
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Panasonic DMC-G1
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Panasonic DMC-GH1/G1HD (check availability)
How do you get the pc to show something again? Do you have to reboot it? Are you sure the pc is still working, any sounds? I’m trying to determine if it’s a monitor not waking up or a pc going to sleep thing.
Yes, I have to reboot it again.
I’m pretty sure the computer has not gone to sleep or hibernated because the fans are still going and the sleep light isn’t blinking. It could potentially have blue screened – maybe I could confirm that by looking for a dump file? There is nothing in the event logs. Or perhaps there’s a way I can get the keyboard and mouse to do something (eg. keypresses that would generate a sound or open the dvd drive) Any ideas?
I also heard there is some kind of “away” mode which if for media centers and powers down certain features such as screen and keyboard but leaves other things running. Cant find any info on that for Vista other than in power options, and I have disabled it. Also, it shouldn’t stop networking.
As I said, the strange thing is I get none of these issues is I leave the display switched on. I cant see how switching the display off would cause network to stop working though unless it is triggering a power event or bsod.
Hmm does the Caps/Num Lock turn on/off while in this “half stop” mode? If they’re not then it’s almost for sure in sleep/hibernation mode.
For the mouse, go to Device Manager, click on Mice, right click your mouse device, properties, go to power management and check the option to allow it to wake the machine.
The only other things that come to mind now are similar to what you already checked such as Bios. Could also be that the display driver you’re using is buggy, or the graphics card is faulty.
Like the caps lock idea. Nice thinking.
In the end I found a program to be causing the issue:
http://lemon.soju.co.uk/2009/01/04/red-herrings/
As I was testing, it did occur to me that I should test with a program other than Syncback, but due to the timing of the failure (when I had display sleep or hard disk sleep enabled, the failure tended to happen at that time) I became sure that it was power related.
Update 10th Jan 2009: While Syncback SE did show this issue, it doesn’t appear to be Syncback SE’s fault. Read here.
Hi,
There seems to be an incompatibility issue with the Iiyama ProLite E2607WS monitor. I’ve seen people complaining about having to reboot their computer to get this monitor going after they turned it off while the computer stayed on.
For example this reviewer at amazon.co.uk:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B001DNLI7W/
Jan,
That’s interesting. It’s exactly the problem I had!
I actually returned the Iiyama monitor and got a different monitor. I had the same problem with the other monitor also, so I don’t think in this case it was the Iiyama’s fault. Of course it’s possible that the crashes I received with the new monitor were due to something else, but I don’t think so.
In my case I did two things which solved the issue: (1) updated to the latest drivers from ASUS for my motherboard (they release drivers every month) and (2) switched off the variable CPU speed function in the BIOS and in Vista. I did both of these at the same time so I don’t know whether both are required to solve the issue or whether only one is required, but I’ve not had any problems since.