weird XP pro laptop problem

[GreatSeaSpider]

Hi guys,

just bought a second hand laptop for my other half, its a tiny laptop but other than that its pretty good

it came with the default tiny install as done by the tiny recovery disk, which obviously needed to go as quickly as humanly possible (xp on a fat32 partition?!?).

So now i've got xp pro (sp1) installed and the drivers installed ala tiny driver disk, all good except that every now and then, the screen simply switches off and the laptop needs restarting to bring it back to life. At first i feared a hardware problem but after a bit of investigation i discovered that:

1. the factory default tiny install (xp home sp1) with no drivers does NOT display the problem.

2. a virgin xp pro sp1 install with no drivers DOES display the problem.

3. a fully patched xp pro sp1 with drivers DOES display the problem.

(I've checked the power saving settings btw and turned them all off)

any help greatly appreciated as i'd rather not cripple this nice athlon 64 3700+ laptop with a naff tiny xp install

cheers,

Pete

 

[RMGBELGIUM]

did you check power savings in the bios also?

 

[captaincrunch00]

Is the screen just trying to switch to an external monitor?

Next time the screen does that, hit the blue FN (or green, or red, or whatever) key down near the CTRL key, then hit F7 or F8 depending on which button looks like it is supposed to represent an external monitor.

On my laptop it'd be a blue FN key and F4, but most Dells are FN and F7 or F8.
You may have to hit it a few times to make it switch between External, Internal, and Both.

 

[GreatSeaSpider]

Thanks for the replies,

yeah i've checked the bios, and tried the function key trick, still nothing

any other ideas?

like i said it doesnt do it using the install on the tiny restart disk so i'm thinking its some windows configuration problem or a driver issue

cheers,

Pete

 

[bygeek]

Have you unchecked the Enable Hibernation on the Hibernation tab in Power Options?