Windows 10: Laptop screen turns completely off when idle, forces me to restart.

These forums are my last hope for resolving this. I am well aware of the power options and familiar with settings - all of the applicable settings, including screen dimming, hard drive time before turning off, and the rest are all tuned to NOT turn off. I found out that the 'never' setting doesn't work for most of them, so most are set to 4 hours or more.

My issue is that I like to go AFK and in that time I lock my screen or just leave it as is. When I come back, say after 10-20 minutes, the screen is utterly black but the laptop is still "on". By that I mean the backlit keyboard is lit and the power button is lit, and I hear the laptop running. Interestingly my external mouse and keyboard turn completely off, as if the computer is asleep. But it should not be.

I have exhausted all avenues and googled to the ends of the earth. I have all but given up on finding a fix for this. I can't even leave my computer idle without a crash. I have to hard restart to get back, and then it's 5 minutes of waiting and reopening everything. Please help me.

:)

 

Windows 10 November update causing issues with Toshiba Laptop

Since updating my Toshiba laptop with windows 10 winter service pack my laptop will not turn off, or restart completely, what happens now when I try to reboot, or shutdown my laptop 1. It exits windows and apparently turns off (black screen) then The power
lights still stay on and my computer apparently doesn't shutdown all the way. I have tried everything I know of, and looked all over the internet for possible solutions with nothing, and being that they force these updates on you and don't let you uninstall
that update I'm forced to reinstall, just to experience the same thing all lover again when it forces me to add that what I call a service pack. Any help please to fix this issue would be greatly appreciated.

 

Computer turns on but doesnt kick in since windows 10 upgrade

I turned on enable fast startup which although is ony supposed to affect a cold boot (turning off then on again) it does appear to me that it improved restarting the computer.

I had this feature off & had the black/grey screen & it took 2-3 minutes to boot, turned it on & it was back to 30 seconds (from off), turned it off again & restarted, it became stuck on the black/grey screen on starting so had to manually force the laptop
to turn off, when it had restarted I immediately turned fast startup back on.

 

Hi, this is a bit of a random thought... and granted you say 'the laptop is still on'. Nonetheless, try disabling hibernate (= delete hyberfil.sys).
Enable or Disable Hibernate in Windows 10 Windows 10 Performance Maintenance Tutorials
That should at least eliminate the chance it's hibernating- or attempting to.
(Noted your specs say desktop, but you're referring to a laptop)


You can try (from an admin command prompt)
powercfg /SYSTEMSLEEPDIAGNOSTICS
to see if anything you see is related to sleep.

- seems to indicate it's nothing to do with the screensaver.

What sort of PC is it? Could you add to your specs?
Are you using a USB wired or wireless mouse and keyboard?
When it's non-responsive, does the touchpad do anything?

 

Here are the sleep diagnostics: file:///C:/Windows/System32/system-sleep-diagnostics.html If you can interpret this better than I can that would be much appreciated. From my first glance every session says "sleep state entered" when the computer should NOT be sleeping. It's like some hidden setting is ticked. I am confident sleep is disabled everywhere.

Nope, the touchpad, USB mouse, and USB keyboard all fail to do anything. Clicking, typing, nothing wakes the computer. It's like it's broken. The laptop in question is an XPS 15z I use, i7-2640m, 6GB RAM, 500GB 7200rpm hard drive and GT 525M.

 

See
Monitor turns off after 2 minutes of inactivity - Page 3 - Windows 10 Forums
#22

There are many many threads posted on unexpected sleep events, but this hasn't occurred for quite a long time.
E.g.
Windows 10 sleeps after 3 minutes, no matter what. Solved - Windows 10 Forums

 

I can't thank you enough for these links. I really do believe the issue was the screensaver set to Blank after 1 minute, and somehow that triggers the problem. Now it's set to (none) and with any luck this solves it. I am going to test it tonight to see if it shuts down when idle and will report back.

 

Plokoon,

When a problem such as this is triggered by a display event [such as the screensaver kicking in], it is possible that the problem is caused by the display driver being corrupted or not compatible with the latest Windows update. Try going to the computer / display card maker's website and installing the latest version [just using Device manage to check for an updated driver would not have the same effect because it has no means of knowing if the installed driver is corrupt or not].

Denis

 

So I tried both of dalchina's linked solutions - no dice. The same thing happened again when I went idle. As a result I tried your solution, Try3. I have been running an older driver for GPU since the newest drivers were causing conflicts with games. Just now I caught my laptop after the screen went off and I was able to wake it, so I don't know if it was going to enter the bug or not.