Problem Restoring Desktop From Sleep

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luksil

Member
The new desktop computer arrived last week and has so far shaken down pretty well.

One problem has cropped up however, whenever the power saving schedule switches the monitor off or puts the computer to sleep I cannot get the session back. All I get is the wallpaper, no icons or toolbar.

Ctrl-Alt-Del just blanks the screen (no task manager or anything like that) and I cannot Alt-tab into any apps that might have been running before the computer went to sleep.

The only thing I can do at this point is reboot.

I thought it might be an issue with the video card not playing nicely with the OS, so I downloaded and installed the latest drivers from NVidia but that hasn't solved the problem.

Any thoughts on what to try next?

Regards
Luke
 
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luksil

Member
Forgot to include some technical context:

OS is Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit, fully patched

DirectX v11.0

Video Card is NVidia GeForce GTS450, drivers updated to 260.89

Monitor is Ityama E2271HDS
 
PCS

PCS

Administrator
Staff member
Not heard of this one before - sounds like a driver/app doesn't like sleep mode and is stopping it recovering. Normally you can "start" explorer from Ctrl-Alt-Del but as this is not working it's difficult to determine. I would suggest loading up the PC and closing down all applications so only the base OS is running, and putting the computer to sleep, then bringing it back out again. Using this trial and error basis should find the culprit.
 
Tom DWC

Tom DWC

Moderator
Moderator
You don't happen to have any custom screen savers installed do you? Something similar happened to a friend of mine. We uninstalled the screensaver package and the problem was resolved.
 
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L

luksil

Member
Hi all, thanks for the replies.

Shibin - judging from the googling I've done, it's a known issue for a fairly small group of Windows 7 installations. I checked back through the fora here but it doesn't seem to be something that has been mentioned before. Is this a problem you've always had with your machine or is it more recent?

Tom DWC - nope, no custom screen savers installed, just whatever is the vanilla for windows 7.

PCS - this behaviour was happening out of the box (I only got the 'puter last week) so it can't be an application conflict (at least, not an application that I've added). It occurs on both the 'switch off monitor' and the 'go to sleep' events in the power management scheme.


I agree that it is most likely some kind of driver conflict (that is what the various microsoft support fora suggest is underlying this issue), which is why I made sure that I installed the latest driver from NVidia before posting my query here. I also d/loaded all of the drivers suggested on the 'Download Drivers' page for my order, altho' I haven't had any luck getting them installed (most don't seem to be appropriate to the kit on my machine). I guess what I'm looking for are some pointers to less obvious things that I could look into.

Regards
Luke
 
PCS

PCS

Administrator
Staff member
Try disabling the wireless card in device manager, re-starting, and then putting it to sleep. Let me know if it recovers from sleep OK.
 
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luksil

Member
Tried disabling the wireless card. No dice, still have the problem.

Also tried replacing the wireless keyboard and mouse with wired equivalents. No dice.

I would like to boot it in safe mode to eliminate the base OS and drivers, but holding the F8 key down doesn't appear to be working for me.
Thoughts?

Regards
Luke
 
P

pulse

Member
Hi mate,

going to take a stab in the dark here, it might be related to explorer.exe not running correctly after the sleep (explorer controls the start menu, task bar, icons etc)

so if all you have is your wallpaper and nothing else..
try:

> Ctrl + Shift + Esc (is an alt. way to bring up task manager)
> New Task...
> type in 'explorer.exe' and hit enter

See if that gets it up and going?

I hate sleep modes, they have always been pretty buggy!

Hope this helps!
 
L

luksil

Member
OK, me again. Still having trouble with the power saving schemes.

Pulse - can't get to the task manager via ctrl-alt-esc once the screen has gone, so I can't try your suggestion. All I have is the wallpaper and a mouse pointer. I can get a right-click menu but several of the options on the menu don't appear to be working. Also if I ctrl-alt-del then I blank the screen and can't get the wallpaper back. That's all the behaviour that I've found so far.

Tapping F8 repeatedly got me into safe mode, thanks Sleinous. Unfortunately the power saving stuff is switched off in safe mode, so I couldn't test the issue with just the basic drivers. So instead I went down the device manager and switched off everything that I was reasonably certain wouldn't stuff me completely by being disabled. Still had the problem.

Sigh.
 
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