After the monitors turn off from inactivity (computer still active, not sleeping) the computer becomes unresponsive and cannot be woken up. When the mouse is shook or you hit a key on the keyboard everything blinks and eventually returns to black. The only thing that will wake the computer up is closing the lid and allowing it to sleep then waking it up again. I have experienced this issue with the windows update drivers and the beta drivers on the plugable website. It it worth noting that the system works perfectly if not allowed to sleep the screens.
My machine: Lenovo T410, 2.67Ghz i7, 8Gb ram, 64bit Win 7 Ultimate, Nvidia NVS 3100M running the laptop screen and an external monitor via display port, plugable UGA-2K-A running a third monitor via DVI.
Hi - Thanks for posting! We’re very sorry you’re experiencing this problem!
It’s helpful to know you’ve tried the latest drivers.
Just to confirm, is it just the USB attached displays that are not coming back to life, or is it the laptop screen also?
And if you unplug/replug the USB adapter, do those screens come back?
Thanks for those quick replies - this information will be helpful. We’ll work to figure this out. Thanks for your patience in using the workaround of turning off power management for the displays, until we have a long term solution here.
It happens with all three displays. Unplugging and replugging the displaylink does not solve the problem. The only thing that makes it responsive again is sleeping the laptop, taking it off the dock, and waking it up.
Thanks for posting the additional detail. This appears to be an nVidia specific return-from-standby problem. We’d like to tackle this with both a short and long term approach:
First, can you register, download, and install the latest DisplayLink 5.6 beta software from http://displaylink.com/support/downlo… – it has a fix for one nVidia specific issue which may be related to yours.
If that doesn’t solve it, we’d like to gather more information to understand the problem and look for a long-term solution. Can you run the DisplayLink Support Tool and send the resulting logs to us for analysis? Instructions at http://plugable.com/support/displayli…
And then short term, we’d recommend turning off display sleep (while allowing the computer to sleep). In Windows 7, you can do that from the advanced power settings:
Thanks for all your help with this! Previously sending us logs, and also connecting potentially related problem reports.
Because you’ve provided such good info about your problem and logs, we’re using your case to highlight this problem to DisplayLink (we’ve submitted your info in ticket #2011011742000046 to DisplayLink … submitted about 20 days ago now). And have been having
Just to re-confirm, does the short-term workaround of setting “Turn off Display” to never (pic above here on the website) eliminate the problem? This is just a short term thing, but knowing whether it does or not makes sure we don’t misunderstand the underlying issue.
And then for the long-term, we’ve had one case where this issue was fixed with the latest nVidia drivers. I couldn’t tell from our previous threads whether you already were on the latest for your adapter (your logs said 8.17.12.5896 Dated 2010-07-09)
Can you please check by visiting http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index… and you can choose option 2 (the “automatically find the right drivers” button). Let us know if this results in any change.
If you did upgrade, but there was no change, would you be willing to reproduce the problem and generate a fresh set of logs (partially to provide evidence to DisplayLink that the problem is not solved by latest nVidia drivers)? Here’s how again: http://plugable.com/support/displayli…
My apologies that this is a difficult problem to track down. Thanks again for your patience staying engaged on this problem until a long-term fix is in place,
Bernie
After 1 minute of inactivity all screens turned off, I moved my mouse and all screens turned back on and are now fully functional, the problem no longer exists, the Nvidia driver update worked!
One note, Nvidia has a newer update (8.17.12.6658 Dated 2011-01-07) and is the one I used.
Thanks for the help Bennie, I am glad I held on to the adapter and did not return it.
That’s great news! Thanks so much for sticking with us to a solution! Just let us know if you see any other problems at all (since return-from-sleep issues can sometimes be intermittent).
Hi Alex - You may have to get the driver directly from Lenovo for the T410.
It looks like they have a version just slightly older than the one that helped Walter, available for download here http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/sit…
Let us know if that version does it. If not, I’m sorry you may have to live with the workaround, until Lenovo approves another nVidia driver update.
Another work around (screen saver/screen power down mode is enforced by IT policy, so I can’t reset the timers):
Press Ctrl-Alt-Del and the first screen eventually should eventually wake up. Select “Start Task Manager”. The screen will black out again, but eventually Task Manager will wake up and the screens will work again. Sometimes takes multiple runs through selecting “Start Task Manager” but it works eventually.
