Screen savers and power managment

[patto58]

  Hello all, I am new on this forum , I think this post may cross over into software but here goes.

I am using a month old Acer laptop, my wife has a 1 year old Toshiba and I have just given away a current model Dell desktop. So there are no "old hardware issues".

All three machines will not run a screen saver or any form of power management , such as blank screen or standby functions.

Please don't say right click on the screen , screen saver setting etc. I have many years of experience with pc's starting with a Tandy TRS80. This issue just has me beat.

I believe this is a registry issue or a disabling of APM by something , but I have no idea what ,or why it would affect three machines in a row. BTW we have another Toshiba laptop which runs the same programs but all screen savers and power management work.

2 machines run win 7 , one is ok, 1 has vista and it doesn't work.

Thank you to anyone who may be able to help.
Geoff

[The Radio Geek]

Hi there Geoff,

Apologies for the delayed response - I am pretty flat out at the moment and this is a part-time affair for me!

Anyway - my immediate reaction is to think power utility conflicts.  Most modern laptops  have proprietary software and firmware tweaks to eek out a few extra minutes of battery time... this is annoyingly mostly done to please a few review websites rather than make them truly useful.

My initial guess is that one system of power management is overriding the other.

Anyway - without any extra information, perhaps you can check the following and get back to the forum.

1) check for running power management programs that might conflict with your screensaver.  Typically, the screensaver is run via the Operating System (OS) BUT power management utilities are often both OS and proprietary software related. Check  in the system tray for power management tools, and the OS control panel for the OS version.

2) Check your firmware - in this case we are referring to your BIOS.  Many modern systems have advanced power management built into their BIOS.  Now - again this is just an idea - you might want to try looking at your bios and disabling the power management systems.  This is only for testing purposes, as I am sure that you will want them in the long run to improve your battery performance.

Basically what you are looking for is one system saying "turn off your screen" (or something similar) in 15 minutes when your screensaver might be turning on in 10 minutes.

Lastly - there are some third party applications that can prevent your machine from going into a power saving mode.  These applications might stop your screensaver from activating at all.  I think this is unlikely as you have mentioned a few machines that have this issue, but if you are running similar software you should consider this too.

Hope this helps,
:)RG