Windows XP Screensaver Problem

It may be a bad graphics card. If you have a spare card or enough onboard graphics to run it you could at least rule it out.

After that snoop around these sites. Maybe one of them or a link off of them will have something.

http://geeks.pirillo.com/forum/

http://www.theeldergeek.com/

http://forums.cnet.com/windows-xp-forum/?tag=forum-w;xNav

Hi markar,

I don't have a separate graphics card. Graphics functions are on MOBO. Everything runs fine except for screensaver shutting down.

-John

Check and see what your power saver settings are. Chances are your system is idle for 30min and wants to shut down the hard drive. There may be something that is then not allowing the next step in the suspend process.

Hello Switchman,

There are no power saver settings to set (I think). If I go to Control Panel/Power Options, there is nothing in the Power Scheme bar (nothing to select). The "Turn off monitor" function is greyed out, so I can't change it. Am I missing something?

-John

sorry Johnjohn,

Was in an all day meeting today for ammonia RMP and didn't see this before I left. All I have here at home are Vista laptops.

When I get in to work in the morning I will dig through my Xp machines and see if I can find something helpful.

Hi bwire,

Thanks to all for replying. Same reply as I gave to Switchman, the "System Hibernation" bar is greyed out, so I can't change it. Again, am I missing something?

-John

P.S. SP2 was included in the Version that I purchased.

System Hibernation" bar is greyed out, so I can't change it. Again, am I missing something?

Greyed out configuration settings indicate you are attempting to change administrative settings from within a standard account. Switch to the admin account.

I have 3 user accounts set up. All 3 have administrator privelege.

One or all are password protected?

Hi bwire,

There are no passwords on this system. However, I may have discovered the problem although I'm not sure how to correct it.

I think the user account that I normally use may be corrupted, i.e., the greyed out functions that I previously mentioned. I logged in on the other 2 accounts on my system and found that "power scheme", "hibernation", etc. were changeable and that "Turn off monitor" function was set to 20 minutes on both of them. I changed it to 4 hours on the other 2 accounts and it seems to hold for my normal login account. I don't want to delete/recreate the user account that I normally use because of losing things like favorites, etc. I may have to eventually recreate it anyway if other anomalies show up. Hopefully, not right away.

Anyway, thanks to all for the input.

-John

Good deal but you should create an account and pass word protect it, windows will consider it as default admin, don't use this acct to surf only for maintenance updates and downloads, etc. This will protect the computer during regular surfing because if corruption occurs it will be contained within a standard acct.

Thanks. Will look into it.

-John

digging back in memory....

If I remember right, some of the older bios ACPI had an enable/disable hibernate. Scroll through the bios and see. Neither of my current dell laptops with XP have that in the bios though.

I do know that the hibernate function had to be supported by drivers and such. You might have something old that isn't allowing it.

Back on the original thing though... something has to be happening at the 30min mark that causes the the screensaver to go off. Usually this is the system wanting to go to stanby or shutdown the harddrive and then it gets stuck.

Try bringing up task manager (cntrl alt delete) go to processes, click on user name once so it lists process types together, and kill everything with your user logon name except for explorer.exe and tskmgr.exe. Then see if the system idles correctly.

It will only corrupt the partition if you dont have service pack two or higher.

They fixed that flaw with Service pack 2.

Steve