NT workst. screen goes blank. Neither scr.saver, nor powersave. What?

[ipupkin]

All, I'm running Win NT 4 SP6 Workstation. Currently, after about 15 minutes of inactivity (i.e. silent mouse and kbd) screen goes blank. It restores when I touch the mouse. It is not desirable behavior in my case.

I'll describe checks I made and then describe recent changes to system.

So I made the following checks:
1) Display properties - there is no screen saver enabled, and no display power management options at all.
2) I seeked through registry all "ScreenSave*" occurencies. All values are 0, timeouts are 60 sec - not 15 minutes I have.
3) I disabled power management in BIOS

This gave no effect. Screen goes blank.

I discovered that certain application (realtime event log viewer, scada actually) looses connection to its Sybase sql server. I suspect that connection had timed out, probably due to suspended processor.

Last changes made to system were:

I changed in registry "shell" from "explorer.exe" to what I needed (scada application - wincc, for those who know); turned on "AutoAdminLogon"; turned on "DisableTaskMgr".

So why can screen go blank while screen saver, monitor power management and power management in bios are all turned off?

Sorry for long description.

 

[2ffat]

It sounds like power management (PM). Do you have a third-party PM software running that doesn't show up in the usual places? Maybe something that came with your UPS?

James P. Cottingham

When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity.
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[djhawthorn]

No "Monitor Power" management options then I take it (on the ScreenSaver tab of Display Properties).

Your monitor / BIOS doesn't have any power saving utilities does it? Usually laptops and the like have built-in power management. MCSE NT4/W2K

 

[ipupkin]

Thanks for replies. I have neither third-party PM software, nor UPS. But when I desperately looked in BIOS again I saw Power Management ON, despite I was in right mind to remember I had disabled it.

Effect has gone after I choosed "Customized" PM mode in BIOS and made all options equal to "Disabled" mode, then saved settings, then changed mode to "Disabled" and saved again.

Not sure whether latter or former helped, no time to check.

Thanks for participation! Never saw WinNT overriding BIOS settings. May be SP6 is too smart about PM?