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December 16, 2006 at 12:46 am #25824TigerbladeParticipant
This is weird. A few days ago, I noticed that whenever I shut the lid on my laptop, even for just a few seconds, the screen would go black. When I opened the lid back up, the screen would come back on after about three seconds or so… except the windows had all been resized and repositioned, similar to what I’d see if I changed my resolution. I can’t figure out what could be causing this. I’ve already checked my power settings, and closing the lid on my laptop is set to do nothing. The only thing I can think of is that about a week ago I installed the latest batch of Windows updates and something in those must have done something. Except… I can’t find any indication of what exactly is causing the problem.
Help? Dell Inspiron 8600, XP Pro SP2.
December 16, 2006 at 3:43 am #155468PhilipModeratorCan you do a System Restore and see whether that helps?
December 17, 2006 at 11:47 pm #155464Jon8RFCMemberActually, I’ve had the same issue lately on my Inspiron 6000. I have an ATI X300 card; what do you have? Looking through, my active programs, I don’t have anything typical except for NIS 2007, all the others are random little things.
I’ll run through my updates and see if there’s anything that stands out to me.
December 18, 2006 at 12:42 am #155462TigerbladeParticipantPhilip – no, I can’t do a system restore. I disabled that a while back.
Jon – I have an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro Turbo card. I wonder then if it’s an ATI thing?
December 18, 2006 at 12:54 am #155465Jon8RFCMemberWell, it’s just been happening lately though. I think I tried to update the drivers but wasn’t able to. The only things that have changed (I think) are Windows updates and I might’ve changed my screen saver to “blank” after 6 minutes and set the screen to turn off at 10 minutes. In power settings>advanced tab I have “do nothing” selected for “when I close the lid of my computer”…is yours set the same way?
December 18, 2006 at 1:48 am #155461TigerbladeParticipantyeah. my screensaver is set to just blank the screen after 10 minutes, and my power settings have “do nothing” selected as well. which is why i can’t figure out what caused this. that was my first thought as well, but… obviously that’s not the culprit.
December 18, 2006 at 4:38 am #155467PhilipModerator:confused: Tigerblade:
It could be that your present ATI driver files are conflicting with your recent updates. Try booting to safe mode and see whether the problem shows up. And also download the latest ATI drivers from their website, uninstall the old drivers and install the new ones.January 20, 2007 at 5:59 pm #155463TigerbladeParticipantupdate
well… a month later and i’m still having this trouble. i have the most recent ATI drivers and all. i found a few discussions about this problem, but none of the fixes presented helped. I found one discussion here that had what i thought would be a fix, but I don’t have the registry key they mention. i searched my entire registry several times with different variations on it, and still nothing.
from a few other places i’d found, i thought it might have been something with an external display (i have my TV connected through S-Video), but that’s not it either. so no luck so far.
January 23, 2007 at 10:38 am #155466Jon8RFCMemberPhilip;211858 wrote::confused: Tigerblade:
It could be that your present ATI driver files are conflicting with your recent updates. Try booting to safe mode and see whether the problem shows up. And also download the latest ATI drivers from their website, uninstall the old drivers and install the new ones.Safemode would be detrimental, if anything, in this troubleshooting process since it doesn’t support widescreen modes or the monitor, so it would still leave a ton of questions unanswered since, obviously, it wouldn’t have any issues in safemode. Also, with Dell laptops, many of the parts they use aren’t widely available to the end-user on a store shelf and many of the available drivers at manufacturer websites (in this case, ATI) only support off-the-shelf products.
None of the recent Microsoft updates installed are related to display functionality, so it isn’t that type of issue.
I read, in that blog posted in this thread, about ExtEvent_EnableAutoDisplayConfig registry entries, and I have 23 of them, so I’m not going to bother those since changing 23 of them is as backwards as reformatting in this situation. It’s such a sporadic problem that a reformat is the solution I would expect to hear from CompUSA since I’m often told by others that CompUSA instructed them to reformat, yet I fixed their problem over the phone instead…so, since I won’t be reformatting in this case, I won’t be changing 23 registry entries in a hit-or-miss attempt to solve the problem, either. I want an answer and a solution, not a “fix” like haphazardly changing 23 registry entries :/ This is why I like mainstream parts, because there’s always a fix for any issue that arises.
I don’t use an external display, so we’re still in the same boat.
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