Question Monitor won't wake up: what is wrong?

jhsachs

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Apr 10, 2009
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First: This question is really for curiosity rather than problem solving. I know repairing the monitor wouldn't be economical if it's possible at all, and I can always replace it.

I have a laptop with a pair of Dell 2407's. I leave the laptop on all the time, but it's configured to put the monitors to sleep after a period of inactivity. They should wake up when I use the keyboard or mouse. Sometimes (about once a week) one of them won't wake up. No amount of mouse shaking or keyboard tapping helps. Nor does turning the monitor off and back on. If I yank out the power cord and plug it back in, the monitor comes right up like nothing was wrong.

Can anyone explain what is happening, beyond "something wrong in the circuitry"? It seems to me that a problem like this, which occurs rarely but only under specific software-controlled conditions, ought to be caused by a fault in the firmware, but that seems vanishingly unlikely.
 
First: This question is really for curiosity rather than problem solving. I know repairing the monitor wouldn't be economical if it's possible at all, and I can always replace it.

I have a laptop with a pair of Dell 2407's. I leave the laptop on all the time, but it's configured to put the monitors to sleep after a period of inactivity. They should wake up when I use the keyboard or mouse. Sometimes (about once a week) one of them won't wake up. No amount of mouse shaking or keyboard tapping helps. Nor does turning the monitor off and back on. If I yank out the power cord and plug it back in, the monitor comes right up like nothing was wrong.

Can anyone explain what is happening, beyond "something wrong in the circuitry"? It seems to me that a problem like this, which occurs rarely but only under specific software-controlled conditions, ought to be caused by a fault in the firmware, but that seems vanishingly unlikely.
Faulty display adapter. Try a new one
 
Dec 27, 2020
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set the sleep from the settings to Never and set on display turn off after (whatever you want) like the picture below
but this way it will only turn off the display and when u press a key on the keyboard or use the mouse the monitor
will turn off
or try using the power butting when the laptop is asleep
WXY8C.png
 
Last edited:

jhsachs

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I set the display settings as Ivan suggested. Since the problem is very intermittent, I won't know for a couple of weeks whether this may have fixed it.

It's not an ideal solution, since I do want the computer to sleep after a period of inactivity, but if nothing more definitive comes up it's a reasonable make-do.

White's explanation raises questions rather than answers them. Since the only way I know of correcting the problem is to power the monitor off and back on, it's not clear how defective display hardware in the computer could be causing it. Or to put it the other way around, it's not clear how a problem caused by a defect in the computer hardware could be corrected by doing something to the monitor. To explain that you will have to explain what could be going wrong -- which was my original question.
 

jhsachs

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Nope. I set "When plugged in, PC goes to sleep after: Never." The monitor still occasionally fails to wake up. I've seen it do this several times since my previous post, but I just checked to make sure that "PC goes to sleep" is still set to "Never"... It is.

It really seems to me that the monitor is doing this.