Grey screen with narrow active bar in B&W at top, after waking from sleep for a while.

[jamiekg]

Begining a day ago for no apparent reason, I now see the following when I wake my screen from sleep (everything else is set never to sleep):

I hear notifications (much delayed) and the mouse moves occasionally within the thin active bar at the top of my LG 29UM69G-B 29" display. But I cannot seem to even get a blindly typed series of actions to restart my i5 8400 using the iGPU only (I'm still waiting for an affordable mid-range discrete GPU) with the latest Intel driver (installed well before this issue arose). The keyboard will wake the screen, however.

I have no idea what has caused this, and would very much appreciate some advice on what to try

 

[Colif]

Its an odd line, especially since bottom shows signs of indentations

Run an anti virus scan and malwarescan

what are rest of specs of the PC?

Try doing a clean boot and see if same thing happens after sleep - read instructions carefully and make sure not to close all MS services or PC won't boot correctly - https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/help/929135/how-to-perform-a-clean-boot-in-windows

if it fixes it, its possible it is caused by a startup program, need to re add them slowly to find what is causing it. Then we can work out why.

 

[jamiekg]

Gigabyte Z370M-D3H-rev-10 motherboard
FSP 600W PSU
Intel NVME 600p boot SSD
Intel SATA 545s SSD
Seagate Firecuda SATA SSHD
Generic cheap SATA Optical drive

And that's everything currently installed inside the M-ATX sized case.

I've tried a reboot, but not a safe one as I'm intensively using the machine today. I'll try that when I next sleep.

I'm running an advanced AV scan right now with Defender. But it's own scans reported nothing a day beforehand, anyway, so that seems extremely unlikely. Especially as I don't engage in risky behaviour.

I'm a fairly competent user, but I have mainly used Mac and Linux machines the past couple decades. This is my first primary work machine running Windows since XP. So I'm out of touch with Windows troubleshooting.

 

[jamiekg]

Oh, and the indentations look like the top few pixels of various UI elements.

 

[Colif]

when you get time, try running Bitdefender free as its a better AV than defender is: https://www.bitdefender.com.au/solutions/free.html
try running malwarebytes as well.

Try going to settings/update & security/troubleshoot and run the hardware and devices troubleshooter - restart PC if required, may need to run it a few times until its finished.

which power scheme are you using?

 

[jamiekg]

No threats found. I'm running balanced 30mins screen off, computer is never off.

 

[Colif]

see if safe boot makes any difference before we look further. I can wait until you have time