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General discussion

External Monitor Goes To Sleep

by dbrid Dec 30, 2009 12:46AM PST

I have been using an external monitor as my primary monitor (with laptop lid closed) for a couple of months now with Win 7. This normally works very well, but occasionally my laptop puts the external monitor to sleep when I right-click on the desktop. I can restart the external monitor by opening and closing the laptop lid, but the right-click issue persists even after a reboot. I can even go into windows explorer, drill down to the desktop folder, then right click inside windows explorer and this shuts off my monitor also. I have checked all of the display settings and everything looks normal. My laptop is an HP G60-535DX, my monitor is an Acer AL1917W and the resolution is set at 1400x900 for the external monitor (recommended setting). My normal laptop resolution is 1366x768 (recommended setting). Everything works fine until I right-click on the desktop. Any ideas on why a right-click puts my external monitor to sleep?

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4 Posts
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I would suspect1
by Jimmy Greystone Dec 30, 2009 12:58AM PST

I would suspect the issue has to do with the two different display resolutions causing a syncing issue. Try running the external monitor at the same resolution as the laptop and see if the issue persists.

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External Monitor Goes To Sleep
by dbrid Dec 30, 2009 4:41AM PST

Interesting - everything started working again with no explicit changes made on my part. I have noticed that in the Appearance->Display->Screen Resolution screen that both displays are now listed - the laptop is showing as display "1" and the external monitor is display "2". Earlier when this was not working properly only the external monitor showed up as "1". I wonder if there is something going on with the Intel Graphics Media Driver that gets out of sorts... it has a bunch of hotkeys assigned for enabling these devices.

I did try the resolution change, my monitor is not 16:9 so the 1366x768 looks terrible. If this is the ultimate solution I will need to do something different here.

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Just sharing
by Jimmy Greystone Dec 30, 2009 9:47AM PST

Just sharing that maybe 8-9 months ago I got a new 27" monitor with a 16:10 aspect ratio, and not too long after that, I got a fairly nice surround receiver to go with my HTPC setup.

Now at the time, I was planning on using my laptop, which has a very nice 17" 1920x1200 16:10 resolution. Incidentally, the same resolution as my 27" monitor. I ran into problems trying to connect everything through my receiver, which did upscaling to 1080p. No matter what I did, I couldn't get the nice 1920x1200 resolution going through my receiver reliably. I could make it work sporadically, but that was it. And since I needed the receiver for audio, I was kind of stuck. Obviously a 16:9 aspect ratio like 1080p looks awful on a 16:10 display.

Ultimately, I ended up finding a pretty good deal on a 32" 1080p TV, and have been pretty happy ever since. The 27" got retasked as a primary monitor for my desktop, and one of my older 20" 4:3 monitors became a secondary.

Moral of the story is: I fear you're fighting a losing battle here, so you might want to keep your eye out for a cheap monitor with a 16:9 aspect ratio.

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resources
by TaraS_WinTeam Dec 31, 2009 2:39AM PST
Back to Windows 7 forum

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