Has anybody noticed in Vista on DVI their monitor turning off briefly (1-2 seconds) when locking their workstation or during startup? It seems to happen only when going between the desktop and the welcome/locked screen. And it only seems to happen when I'm hooked up via DVI. On VGA it's a smooth transition.

This is happening on 2 different computers with 2 different monitors.

I've not yet seen Vista Ultimate do that, but I have seen what I believe is the same symptom during startup under XP home, pro, and mce on integrated and adapter ports on multiple brands of computers and displays. Except I've seen it also on the VGA port as well. I've seen it last from about 1 second to two seconds.

However, during what I've seen, the display does not show the "No signal" frame, so the display is still getting a signal, but it's just being blanked. My hypothesis was that it was blanking on each port for a moment as the system checked for the presence of other PnP monitors on the other ports in a multi-port system...but, I haven't confirmed that.


edit-for clarity, added that symptom was seen on more than just one version of XP..."home, pro, and mce", and on integrated and adapter ports, multiple brands of computers and displays

Hmm. In my case, I'm pretty certain it's not just getting a "black screen" signal. On my monitor at least, it takes a few (3-4) seconds of no signal before it actually registers the "no signal" message. I do though see my monitor's power LED go from blue (on/getting a signal) to orange (on/no signal).

I just can't figure out why VGA doesn't do it but DVI does. The best I can come up with is these are old video cards I'm working with and VGA may be hard coded to be the default device in the video card's BIOS.

Well hrm hum, on a crazy hunch, I uninstalled ATI Catalyst 8.4, and went back to the "stock" Vista drivers for my card. Aero still works (as I figured it would since it worked before I ever installed Cat), but the problem has gone away. So the bug is somewhere in ATI's drivers (go figure).

I've had issues between the MS provided and NVidia provided Video drivers.
My biggest issues haven't been with speed, but with shutdown and restart.
My two flat-panels will not re-sync after a hard shutdown without multiple resets, then finally they'll pick up. One of the reasons I don't shutdown that often.

I'm actually having more problems with ATI's 8.4 than I am with the "stock" Vista drivers. The problem now is, I can't run ATI Tray Tools with these drivers, but at least I now know that 8.4 was behind my monitor freaking out problem.

I'm going to try 8.3, then 8.2 ... etc, working my way back until I find one that works ... I doubt I'd notice any performance hits on my ancient X800 anyway until I hit about the Cat 5.x series. (which don't support Vista anyway).

Well, I've tried everything from 7.1 to 8.4, they all do it. ATI doesn't give two s**ts about the X800 anymore anyway. Since my card is from 2004, and Vista's 'stock' drivers are from 2006, I figure they support everything my card can do anyway. I'll just stick with them.

MkFly said:
Thanks for following-up and sharing the info on your experiment with the drivers. I've got a couple machines that still use the X800 series too. I generally no longer use 'suspend'/'hibernate' because of the continuing problems Microsoft and vendors seem to have properly handling all the ACPI configurations, but it's still good info.

One of the more interesting things I picked up was that ATI Tray Tools doesn't really care if you're using Catalyst, it just cares if it's installed. When it wasn't installed, ATT would refuse to load (but my screen blanking problem was gone). When Catalyst was installed, ATT loads (and the screen problem was back).

The workaround (for me at least) seems to be to install Catalyst (to satisfy ATT), but then manually change the video card driver via Device Manager to the Vista stock ATI driver (but keeping Catalyst installed). That seems to solve both problems, and my 3D performance doesn't seem impacted at all by it.

Yes its happens to me as well Vista makes the monitor black out and come back on sometimes.