T42 turns off and doesnt come back.

[dsi-ap]

We have a T42 with display power settings set to Thinkpad defaults.

Running on batteries
Turn off monitor: 5mins
Turn off hard disks: 10mins
System standby: 5mins
System hibernates: 20mins

When Plugged into mains power, settings for all is set to 'Never'.
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What happens is after leaving the laptop to idle for a while on the desk, the screen goes black and can no longer activate the screen back by moving the trackpad or pressing any keys.
A blue screen appears and laptop reboots which is to fast to make any notes what the message.

Has anyone else come across this problem?

[cmarti]

PC Doctor can help you find the problem, here is a link where you can download it.

Pc doctor 5.

[GomJabbar]

Just a couple of days ago, I also noticed something similar on my T42 running XP Pro. I am on AC power almost all the time, but a couple of days ago I was on battery, and when the timer turned off the display at 5 minutes, I could not get it to turn back on by moving the TrackPoint (and no, it wasn't in Standby). Pressing various keys such as Fn, Esc or the mouse keys did not make any difference either. What did work was to press Fn + F4 to put the T42 into Standby, then after it was in Standby, press the Fn key to bring it back out.

I know I didn't have this behavior before, but I have not spent the time to troubleshoot it yet. I suspect one of the updates I applied recently. The most likely culprits are the ATI display driver update I applied a couple of weeks ago, or the Power Management Driver I applied about a month ago. It might even possibly be the Presentation Director update.

I also have Vista RC1 on a different hard drive, and I have noticed some strange behavior there as well. If I press Fn + F3 to turn off the display, I cannot get the display to turn back on by moving the TrackPoint for about the first 2 minutes after I have pressed Fn + F3. However if I go from the dark display into Standby, then come right back out of Standby, the display comes right on. Interestingly, the Power Management driver version is the same on both the XP and Vista installs.

[GomJabbar]

Last night I tried putting the ATI display driver and the Power Management Driver back to their previous versions without any real effect. I did happen to notice that the problem did not occur in the Administrator user account, but did initially in a different user account. It turns out that I had a different power profile chosen in each user account. The problem happened when I logged off of the Administator user account and logged into my regular user account. If I changed the power profile to the same one as the Administrator was set to, I did not have a problem bringing the display back by moving the TrackPoint. I think the thing to do is make sure that you have the profile you have chosen active. Try changing the power profile to something else, then change it back to the one you want to use. If you change the display brightness settings with Fn + Home or End, you may need to rechoose your power profile again.

The above information is preliminary and may be revised with more experimentation. I think I will try applying a powercfg registry key that I saved last year and see if the behavior is any different. First I will export my existing powercfg key, delete the key from the registry, then run the powercfg.reg file that I saved from before, to restore the key a known good state. See thread below for information on this.

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=18823