A
Anthony Buckland
Flightless Bird
I have a Sony VAIO desktop, purchased in 2006, running
XP Professional with SP3, fully updated. I have the
screensaver set to none, and the power settings set to
turn off the picture on my monitor (ViewSonic) after 15
idle minutes. The hard drive is never turned off, the
system never goes into standby, and the system never
hibernates.
This worked fine until a few weeks ago. Now I find my
monitor always on, no matter how long the idle time has
been. If I happen to be present at the end of a 15-minute
interval, I can see the screen momentarily turn off and
then turn on again, with no more than 2 seconds of
darkness.
I've tried updating my video card, monitor, keyboard and
(wired, optical) mouse drivers. Nothing better than my
present drivers was found. I've tried unplugging the mouse,
and then the keyboard. This made no difference.
I've found various forum discussions with Google on this
and closely similar problems. None of them offered a
solution (except one that would have required subscribing
to see the responses to the question), apart from other
users suggesting reviewing the power settings, updating
drivers and looking in a very general sense for some
software that might make the system believe it was not
idle. Aside from Windows updates, the only software
that might be recently changed would be my antivirus,
ZoneAlarm Extreme Security, which from time to time
updates itself. The only software I _know_ of, anyway.
Does this remind anybody of possible causes or
solutions? Thanks for any comments.
XP Professional with SP3, fully updated. I have the
screensaver set to none, and the power settings set to
turn off the picture on my monitor (ViewSonic) after 15
idle minutes. The hard drive is never turned off, the
system never goes into standby, and the system never
hibernates.
This worked fine until a few weeks ago. Now I find my
monitor always on, no matter how long the idle time has
been. If I happen to be present at the end of a 15-minute
interval, I can see the screen momentarily turn off and
then turn on again, with no more than 2 seconds of
darkness.
I've tried updating my video card, monitor, keyboard and
(wired, optical) mouse drivers. Nothing better than my
present drivers was found. I've tried unplugging the mouse,
and then the keyboard. This made no difference.
I've found various forum discussions with Google on this
and closely similar problems. None of them offered a
solution (except one that would have required subscribing
to see the responses to the question), apart from other
users suggesting reviewing the power settings, updating
drivers and looking in a very general sense for some
software that might make the system believe it was not
idle. Aside from Windows updates, the only software
that might be recently changed would be my antivirus,
ZoneAlarm Extreme Security, which from time to time
updates itself. The only software I _know_ of, anyway.
Does this remind anybody of possible causes or
solutions? Thanks for any comments.