I have recently been setting up a brand new Vista Home Premium 64 bit pc and cannot for the life of me get the screen saver to kick in (not that having one is important) but also the " turn off display " and " put the computer to sleep " etc does not work either.


It's as though something is stopping the pc from being idle but I just can't find what it is .... I've spent two days on this already and think I have covered most things but hoping somebody can suggest something I haven't tried or something I've overlooked.

**Note, I haven't got a wireless keyboard and mouse on this setup .. it has the Logitech G11 gaming keyboard and Logitech G5 laser gaming mouse .

I have tried setting the screen saver to none (as well as trying different screen savers and time settings) to see if at the period of time the display would go off and in turn later go to sleep etc ... no joy

Please help ... this is driving me mad and I'm going to end up taking this thing back which will also drive me mad after all the work I've put into setting it up!!

Why do new pc's always have stupid problems!

Do these functions work if you boot into "Safe Mode"? If so, disabling items in the Startup tab of MSCONFIG on a "trial & error" basis might be the way to go.

This any help Anne?

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/165508-hibernation-enable-disable.html

Sorry for getting back to you both so late .... kids, relatives and friends etc = no time to myself

Anyway, will get round to trying safe mode Mike and report back if it functions correctly ... in the mean time I have got the screen saver to actually work, AND the display off and sleep etc all worked as they should, but only when they feel like!

Something must be stopping windows from detecting the pc as idle, maybe a process that isn't ending fully, maybe a Norton related process but I am at least glad to discover the power options will and do work albeit in a fashion at present

Thanks for the link too Dave although I'm sure it is relevant to the current problem, I've bookmarked it though in case

When my son lets me have time enough to investigate again I'll post and let you know how I get on ... now he has it in his room I might have to wait until he's back in school.

> I have recently been setting up a brand new Vista

With it being Vista, I feel it may well be a nightmare to track down the actual culprit.
At the moment the only thing I can think of is not having the time either set correctly or having them set too close to one-another.


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Oops, just re-read the original question, but will leave this any way as it might help some one else with a different problem (now it's typed).

If the PC keeps waking up at odd times when it should not.

My first choice would be to check in the "Task Scheduler settings" Vista has this very annoying habit of having many items to run at scheduled times "most of which are very late at night and very early in the mornings IE 4am.

List of possible suspect =
MS Auto Updates.
System Restore.
De-frag.
Anti Virus trying to update.
Modem set to ring out.
Checking for email.

Thanks for the suggestions anyway Phil ........ like you say, they may help others.

For anybody else with screensaver troubles try simple steps first such as selecting a different screen saver, and not a third party one which can often be the cause of problems, set a low time such as 1, 2 or 3 mins, and always click to "Apply" and "OK" the settings.

Sometimes this simple change can set everything off on the right track again.

If you get a black screen and no screen saver seen, check out the power options, found in control panel or access via screen saver settings window, you should check to make sure that turn off display is not set to occur before the time set for a screen saver to kick in.

**Users of wireless microsoft keyboard/mouse use windows updates as there's an update which will fix the problem.