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Anon

[WIN7] Screen Saver, Monitor Power Down, Never Works

I've spent the last four days building a fresh install of Win 7 Pro 64-bit on a new Intel 335 SSD HD. Mainboard is Gigabyte P35-DQ6 rev 1.0. Graphics card is nVidia GT8800.

All throughout the setup of my applications, I noticed that the monitor never once shut down after leaving the system idle for longer than the ten minute timeout for power down of the monitor as set in the power profiles.

I've used the command console to run powercfg and check for devices that may be preventing sleep. In fact, only the HDDs power down. The main system never goes on standby, either.

I have a hunch that my LG GGWH20L BD burner may be preventing the system from sleeping, because when it's hooked to the SATA port, the HDD LED flashes 1/sec non-stop. I've turned off autoplay and even disabled it in the registry (the tweak that was necessary to stop the HDD LED flashing in my prior OS, Win XP). But that does not work in Windows 7 Pro RC1 64-bit.

I googled the matter and the only other thing was a discussion saying that monitor power down does not work if screen saver set to none. So I set to something like 'ribbons' and set that to 1 minute and power down in 2 minutes. No applications loaded. Screen saver never started and monitor never powered down later. It looks like this function is totally broken in Windows 7. Lots of complaints about it if you Google the topic.

I'd really like to stop that polling of my BD burner and see if that's what's preventing my screen from powering down. Any ideas?

jaa
Premium Member
join:2000-06-13

jaa

Premium Member

said by disconnected :

It looks like this function is totally broken in Windows 7. Lots of complaints about it if you Google the topic.

Did you try disconnecting the burner to see if that is the problem? Disconnect everything you possibly can and see if it works.

I don't think it is totally broken - I've yet to see the issue on any win7 computer. My guess is the hardware is telling win7 that it is in use, which is why the screen saver never comes on and the screen never blanks.
Mele20
Premium Member
join:2001-06-05
Hilo, HI

Mele20 to disconnected

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I had this happen years ago on a new computer with nVidia card. It turned out to be the nVidia GeForce driver. It took nVidia forever to fix it. This was on XP Pro. I had the same problem of the monitor (not the computer itself) not being able to go to stand down at the specified time on a 98SE computer. That turned out to be caused by a new piece of hardware. I had to stop using that piece of hardware entirely. Two different OSes, two different monitors one CRT and one LCD.

You are using "sleep" and "monitor going to screensaver and then turning off" interchangeably. They are not the same thing. My computers NEVER sleep, the hard drives are rarely turned off (unless I am going on vacation or have to work on the innards of the computer) but my monitor is set to start screensaver at 3 minutes of inactivity and turn off at 5 minutes. I have always had this sort of set up since my first computer. My point is that you may have one thing preventing sleep and an entirely different thing preventing the monitor from turning off.

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Anon

I have my computer set to turn off the monitor at 10 minutes and to sleep after 4 hours. Neither feature works.

I do have an nVidia GeForce 8800GTS with the most recent Win 7 64-bit driver. Do you know what build or version of nVidia driver has this problem fixed?

I have yet to experiment with pulling the plug on the LG burner.
Mele20
Premium Member
join:2001-06-05
Hilo, HI

Mele20

Premium Member

It's probably something else especially if you have the latest nVidia driver. Although it could that latest driver version.

I think you have to unplug the burner. See if it works then. If not, then you need to take everything you can out of the systray and shut down your browsers and see if the screensaver will come on and/or the monitor turns off. Set the monitor to turn off at a shorter time while you are troubleshooting. It could even be something like your mouse...something is keeping the monitor on. If you eliminate as much as you can and it does turn off then add back one at a time until you find the culprit.

Try a different screen saver...ribbons should be ok, but then Photo Gallery, which is from Microsoft, should be ok also as a screen saver on my new Win 8 computer. However, if I use it for the screen saver my monitor never turns off. If I use "Photos" (different from Photo Gallery). or "ribbons". or even no screen saver. the monitor turns off when it is supposed to, but not if I use Photo Gallery which I really like and want to use. It could be almost anything causing your problem. It never occurred to me, years ago, with a new computer and nVidia card that the latest driver update was preventing my monitor from turning off. Only when I finally saw posts at nVidia forums about it did I realize that was the culprit.