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Hangs after screen dims

Discussion in 'Windows 8' started by Tony D, May 27, 2020.

  1. Tony D

    Tony D Administrator Administrator

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    Working on a W8.1 machine. Problem is after the screen dims (as set in Power Options) it then goes black and the machine hangs. Note: the screen is dim for about 30 seconds until it goes totally black.

    Caps Lock and Num Lock lights don't toggle. Tapping on keys, moving the trackpad have no effect. I hold the power button until I hear the hard drive shut down. It then starts back up fine.

    Doesn't exhibit this behaviour in Safe Mode.

    I've done a bunch of Windows updates. Turned off a bunch of things in msconfig.

    From a command prompt, I reset power settings using powercfg -restoredefaultschemes.

    Problem persists.

    I've seen messages that the Intel HD Graphics driver stopped. That driver is pretty recent - dated Dec 2018.

    Any thoughts?
     
  2. Tony D

    Tony D Administrator Administrator

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    This machine came in with issues. There was some hard drive corruption which I though I had sorted out until now. I did some updates hoping corrupted files would get written over, but the problem persisted.

    sfc /scannow reported it was unable to fix some files. Have you ever tried to read a sfc log?

    I think I'll move this W8.1 machine to W10. Hopefully, that will fix things.
     
  3. IJAC

    IJAC Super-Moderator Super Moderators

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    Can you try this:
    For Intel
    The exact layout of Intel's options may vary from system to system
    Intel system tray icon > Graphics Properties > Power > On Battery > Display Power Saving Technology
     
  4. Seth Anthony

    Seth Anthony Registered Members

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    It seems as though the video driver is crashing Windows. Uninstall the driver and see if the issue remains.
     
  5. Tony D

    Tony D Administrator Administrator

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    :bnghd: I knew that. If someone was posting here with a similar issue, I'd tell them to uninstall the driver. Don't know why I didn't do that in the first place. I'm going to work with it a bit more, but things on this machine. I think it's getting a new hard drive.
     
  6. Tony D

    Tony D Administrator Administrator

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    I've installed a new hard drive. Restored using an image I made the other day. After bootint to the old W8, installed W10 from USB Flash drive . It was running fine for a short while, then things started to change. Maybe because I connected it to a network and it started updating. I know it did some updating because some devices that weren't installed in Dev Mgr are now installed.

    Anyway, the screen is flashing to black intermittently. When it does the mouse hangs momentarily. It's not stable.

    Wondering if the W10 install brought over bad drivers from the original W8.1 install. None of the programs that were on this machine are showing up.
    Or maybe this machine has a bad graphics chip. It's a Toshiba Satellite L75.
     
  7. Seth Anthony

    Seth Anthony Registered Members

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    Have you tried uninstalling the driver yet?

    I'd do it from device manger and choose to delete the driver.
     
  8. Tony D

    Tony D Administrator Administrator

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    I did uninstall the driver and let it reinstall itself earlier this morning. Problem persisted it. Thought too much damage was done to the hard drive. So I installed a new hard drive and loaded W10.

    It looked good. I noted 5 devices were not installed per Device Manager. I then checked the wireless by connecting to my network. Later on, the screen started acting up again. I also noted the devices in Device Manage were installed. So Windows was doing something without me intervening.

    I just loaded W10 again and this time I allowed it to format the drive. I see no Window.old directory so it must have really formatted the drive. Now I'm going to connect to the network and see what happens.
     
  9. Tony D

    Tony D Administrator Administrator

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    Now that W10 is working nicely, I left the Device Manager open so I could watch what was going on. Once I connected to the network, I saw devices being installed. When the Display adapter changed from MS Basic Display to Intel HD Graphics, the problem with the flickering screen and hanging machine started again.

    I was able to roll back the driver to MS Basic Display Adapter. Once I did that, the problem went away.

    Note: All Devices are now installed. I didn't have to do anything. Windows 10 has a mind of its own.

    After a restart it's still good.
     
    allheart55 (Cindy E) likes this.
  10. Seth Anthony

    Seth Anthony Registered Members

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    Windows update will install that intel driver and you'll be back to square one. Try getting the latest driver from the Toshiba site.
     
  11. Tony D

    Tony D Administrator Administrator

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    That's what I'm afraid of. I was at Toshiba's site. The drivers there are older than the Intel one.
     
  12. Seth Anthony

    Seth Anthony Registered Members

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    Yep. Well I guess you could install that driver from the Toshiba site then disable window's update ;)

    Unless there is now a method to just disable driver updates? Hmm..
     
  13. Seth Anthony

    Seth Anthony Registered Members

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  14. IJAC

    IJAC Super-Moderator Super Moderators

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    Good find Seth I will have to put that in the memory bank (on the computer not in my head).
     

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