Thinkpads Forum

Anyone know what to do for this problem? Despite shutting off display related power manager functions in
Ubuntu 10.10, the display will not remain on for more than 15 minutes of keyboard or mouse inactivity. This is serious issue because in order to stream a TV show or a movie, I have to press a key every 14 minutes or the laptop and the TV display darkens. The sound remains on but the display darkens. To get display back after that I must enter my password.

Is there something else I can do. I look around in BIOs but I only see two power down functions I can turn off CPU and
Bus. In display settings, there is only external monitor and HDMI enable\disable

I believe I read complaints about this issue when running Windows 7 also. Would anyone be so dumb as to design a laptop to hardware auto turn off the display after 10 minutes of no activity?

Lenovo designed this thing for multimedia, including excellent widescreen , HD video and sound, and HDMI. Making it to hardware auto shut down display, internal and external makes no sense, not even to Acer or Dell.

I have the same problem with my T500 and i915 driver (Intel graphic card active). The driver (KMS enabled) completely ignores X screensaver settings. The only solution that worked for me was to set a high enough screensaver timeout ("xset s 20000" for 20000 seconds), but that doesn't seem to work anymore (still have to find the real cause of the problem).

Thanks for the reply. I run Vista and several Lunix distros in my T-60. None shut down my display. Unfortunately, it doesn't
have HDMI or HD.

I read the Edge manual. Lenovo states that it set the Edge, for Energy Star compliance, to dim the display after 10 minutes.
I was able to find where I can disable power management in Win 7 but Ubuntu 10.10 just dims anyway. It would not
be such a game buster for streaming video to TV if Ubuntu didn't required entry of password to get the display up.

What gets me is why current laptops do not have a key you can press to shut down the display when you use and external
display. About eight years ago, every laptop I saw had this capability.

There is no need to run the laptop display when streaming to a TV. Seems Energy Star Go Green propeller hat & solar panel jacket boys would think of this a a much bigger energy saver than auto dim after 10 minutes of no keyboad or mouse activity!
...But I find many Green fanatics do tend to be seriously math and science challenged. I mean if they ever did the math, they would realize that the rate at which they claim rain forest disappears each year, we would have no rain forests at all 15 years ago. The average water wasted rate they claim for running water while brushing teeth would mean such a big
water & sewage bill that only the well to do could afford to let it run while they brushed. Even then, they would have to
be brushing their teeth at a fire hydrant and do something dentists say few people do, brush the dentist recommended 10 minutes, 3 times a day.

--Briused