Thinkpads Forum

I have the Ultradock connected to my external monitor whenever I am at the office.

I have the Ultradock eject button set to eject my X61s and put it to stand by.

Sometimes, when I awake the machine from stand by when i am out of the office, the computer turns on but the screen is off. Even if I try to put into stand by again (through the power button) and then on again, the screen is just black.

It seems that if I enter the password to Vista logon (without actually seeing anything typed cause the screen is black). After the logon to Vista the screen will turn on again. It seems to me that the computer does not recognize the internatl notebook monitor, but only after the logon of windows (which is stupid). Any help? does someone else experience the same?

thanks

I had this problem for a long time with my X61 running Vista.

It was never a consistent issue but, if the machine had failed to recognise the internal LCD, then the only way to get it back would be to reboot the machine. It was infuriating, because if I put the machine into hibernate mode and restarted it, it would show the restarting screen on the internal LCD but, when Windows restarted, it would once again fail to use the LCD!

Anyway, I don't have the problem any more. I did three things:

1. Installed a hotfix for Vista. I don't know where I found it (it was from the Microsoft site, I think) but it specifically dealt with the blank LCD issue (a known Vista issue).

2. Even after installing the hotfix, I still had some issues. But, on this forum, I was told that repeatedly putting the machine into standby and restarting it (say, 4 or 5 times) would sometimes put the LCD back to life. And so it did.

3. Install Vista SP1. After doing this, I've not had the problem again.

Hope some of this helps, you're not alone.

Hi, thanks a lot for the reply! I will definitly try doing these 3 things.

i cannot find that patch. the only thing i found about blank screens is something unrelated (about when updating video driver which has nothing to do to my case).

also about the SP1, it seems to me my compuer is already updated with all the patches through windows update (microsoft say on their site, one should not download the whole SP1 file (about 500mb) since the relevant patches to one machine's are updated anyway thrugh the windows update. so i guess i am still stuck with this problem which drives me nuts.

I might have the same issue.