Resolved Turn Off Backlight

I'm trying to figure out how to get my desktop to go into Blank Screen Saver mode, without any backlight on the display. I have the machine connected to a Samsung plasma screen. Before, when the screen saver kicked in, the screen would usually go dark (like it was off). Occasionally the backlight would stay on with the screen saver and I was never able to pin down what was causing that.

Now the backlight stays on every time. To complicate things, this is a music server, so I have most of the services and registry settings turned off and most of the original Windows features were removed from the installation, with RT7 Lite. The machine is using the generic Windows VGASave video driver.

I noticed the problem around the time I turned off a few hundred of the Registry entries in the CurrentControlSet/Services folder, so the issue may be there. I may have to just find an old system image and start over. However, I'd love to track down the root cause and I know that if I can't find it here, I won't find it anywhere else.

Cheers

 

Not sure what your definition of Futility is Arie. I might agree with frustrating some of the time. This machine is a music server, connected to some pretty sophisticated audio equipment. The purpose of the tweaking is that it can give you better sound (if your stereo system is resolving enough to capture the improvement). Shutting down activities that aren't critital to playing music files reduces the jitter in the audio signal that's passed through the USB cable, to the DAC. I have a 2nd boot section on my machine that's only moderately tweaked (to still allow for Internet connectivity, playing Blu-ray, etc) and the sound is noticeably inferior to that of the audio boot section (again, some audio equipment is not capable of highlighting the difference at this level).

The "sleep greyed out" post responses were actually worthwhile. I hoped for a different answer, but now I know it's a choice between having the sleep feature or using the Intel video driver. 8-bit color with the VGASave driver sounds better than the Intel, so I'll go without the sleep feature, but at least I know there's no way to fix it.

Goddez1, thanks for your suggestions. I forgot to mention that the Samsung has an annoying habit of displaying a waring message on the screen when the display is turned off and it doesn't even move around fast enough to avoid screen burn.

This is probably going to have to come down to someone who knows the registry well enough to know which settings might affect backlight. Otherwise, I will load the older system image and try testing each one, to see if I can find it.

 

I haven't deleted any keys, just disabled them. I'm surprised there isn't more knowledge of the Windows Registry out there, even with developers. This guy put a few hundred hours into manually testing each key.

http://www.graphixanstuff.com/Forum/index.php?showtopic=15194

With the Last Good Configuration, Win 7 is a lot more forgiving, though it can be challenging even with image backups and restore points. I can say from experience that there can be a lot of learning the hard way when you do this stuff, especially if you bypass the proper backup procedures and don't take a disciplined approach to making only a few changes at a time and documenting them. Thus, I don't advocate this for anyone who isn't ready for a little or a lot of learning the hard way.

That said, Windows has a tremendous amount of garbage running in the background that you will never use, Black Viper, who's mentioned on this site is an excellent resource and the Autoruns program also turns up a lot of unused drivers and activities, running under the surface of any interface in Windows.

 

you can turn off display at a custom time from power options...

fiddling with registry settings is a last resort, theres are reason why any procedure regarding registry modifications have a warning. If its not from the Windows GUI, you run it from group policies or security policies, and if no resolution, only then should you touch the registry. I personally dont trust myself making registry modifications, even with the entire registry and sections backed up. And thats because that even though its backed up, theres not a guarantee that you can recover.

Trying to save you from my own lessons learned.

 

I traced this problem to the type of video cable. I had forgotten that I was using both VGA and HDMI cables at the same time before this issue came up. I took the VGA out when I found that HDMI also worked with the VGASave driver. The VGA sleeps without backlight and HDMI with it.

Most people will opt for the HDMI, to get higher quality video and have to live with a backlit TV screen. With a Samsung and probably most other screens, you can't just turn off the display, because the TV puts up a big blue warning that says "no signal ", for several minutes.

This brings up an interesting point about changing the registry key start values. Granted, registry changes are not worth the time for the vast majority of computer users (you might also say that about turning off services), but tweaking a system requires you to put a little time and effort into it.

Lamini, you concerns about touching the registry are a little overblown, for Win 7. The link I posted above shows work from a guy who spent 7 hours a day for two months researching keys in the Services folder, explaining what they do and which ones will give a BSOD. You shouldn't touch the start values of the service keys without having a backup image, a restore point, know how to use "last good configuration ", make a list of the original and new setting of anything you change and go slow. However, there are several things that auto start in the registry that nobody every uses.

As I mentioned above, Autoruns.exe is an excellent tool to easily turn a majority of this stuff off. Remember, if you skip any of the precautions in the above paragraph and you either won't be able to get back to where you started or won't be able to trace what's causing a problem that comes up.

 

dumb question but I gotta ask, why are you touching the registry when you can do the same from msconfig and Services? This whole conversation seems to be about services, and you can do all that from Services and msconfig consoles. Is there something from regedit you needed to modify that the simple tools couldn't (power options, msconfig, services, device manager)?

 

There's quite a few things you can't get to from Services, MSCONFIG and Device MGR. Sometimes it's from a program you installed and don't want registry keys to run at startup and other times it's from Windows.