Monitor won't wake up when coming back from sleep (Windows 7)

Dell Optiplex 990 with Radeon HD6450. Same problem.

In a previous post I said I had tried everything to solve the sleep problem. I guess I tried everything -1. Thanks for this advice it fixed my problem. It's such a pleasure to not leave my PC on 24 hours a day.

Thanks again.

MS Windows 7 Pro

Intel Core i7 2600K

16.0GB DDR3

ASUSTeK Computer INC. P8P67 PRO

LG Flatron W2442 (1920x1080@60Hz)

BenQ E2420HD (1920x1080@60Hz)

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460

625GB Western Digital WDC WD6402AAEX-00Z3A0 (SATA)

Hi all, I have now read ALL posts on this thread! For anyone else who has, you'll see an amazing range of theories as to cause and proposed solutions. I believe for most of us posters, it IS fundamentally a Windows 7 problem (I'll justify my position on that in a moment). If you want to skip straight to “PROPOSED WORKAROUND”, skip down a couple of paragraphs.

I have worked as a Hardware Engineer, Software Engineer, and Firmware Engineer. If I had the time (and felt like doing Microsoft's debugging work for free), I would dig deep into this issue to positively identify the main root Windows 7 cause and fix for this, but, short of that, I propose a nearly “painless” workaround that can at least help us avoid having to reboot the PC to wake up the monitor.

One of the posters mentioned remotely logging in and discovering that the PC was running fine, but somehow the monitor DIDN'T appear in the list. He then launched the Hardware Discovery Wizard and behold, at that point W7 discovered and ran with the monitor properly (per that session). [Very clever doing remote login to confirm that the PC was awake and running, and then launching Hardware Discovery to force re-discovery and function of the monitor!].

PROPOSED WORKAROUND

Suppose we configure a Hot Key to the Hardware Discovery Wizard (e.g. “Ctrl”+”Alt”+”m” for “monitor wake”), or perhaps other process or execution of a batch file that will trigger discovery of the monitor. That way, when the problem rares its ugly head and you are running BLIND, you can hit a magic key sequence to restore monitor operation. (Assigning a hot key to a program short cut is fairly easy to do; plenty of help on that online).

For those of us used to macro recorder programs, we could program a hot key to do a sequence, such as “Launch Hardware Discovery” plus other keys necessary to actually make it run further (such as automatically clicking OK buttons, Next, closing the Hardware Discovery program, etc.).

As an aside, I'm wondering if there might be more clues in event logs that would definitively show how / why W7 has “forgotten” about the monitor.

Back to my particular case...

I have a Fit-pc2 (which BTW has memory chips SOLDERED to the MB; no RAM change outs possible!), and also Magic Jack. I was originally running Windows XP, and never had the “Stuck in sleep monitor” problem. HOWEVER, Magic Jack does muck with power saving / sleep modes. In fact, was never able to get any kind of sleep hibernate to work with MJ before under XP. There's all kinds of writeup online re: how MJ defeats power saving modes to keep the MJ running at all times, IN SPITE OF earth-kind / money-saving power saving modes the user may want to utilize (that MJ issue a whole can of worms in itself).

After running XP for about four years, my SSD (solid state hard drive) crashed hard, so when I set about recovering my system, I “upgraded” to Windows 7 (I had reached a comfort level with XP, but didn't want to go through the 200+ Windows updates again). So the point here is that ALL OF MY HARDWARE stayed the same, EXCEPT for my new SSD, which I do NOT believe would have anything to do with the monitor / sleep problem.

Only after I recovered my PC, up and running with W7 for about a month--and after some number of “stealth” automatic W7 upgrades—did I start having this intermittent problem (even now, it doesn't fail all the time—just sometimes).

As for the “stealth” W7 upgrades, I've been tangling with W7 changing the upgrade mode to FULLY AUTOMATIC, even though I had set it before to download but NOT INSTALL until I agreed to it. That's a whole other (though possibly related) annoying issue, where W7 downloads, the sets up for automatic reboot, whether I'm near the PC or not! (On a couple of occasions I've caught it and averted automatic reboot, thus saving my work). I know, that might be considered whole other problem (a bug in my book) but I am mindful of the idea another poster had that W7 may be doing automatic updates that introduce and/or re-introduce the sleepy monitor bug at hand.

Okay, there's my story, and my proposed quick workaround. If anyone finds a nicer universal “monitor wakeup” workaround—before MS gets around to fixing it--via Hot Key / macro (or something better?) please share it.

SOLVED!!! 

In the BIOS you need to set the PLL Overvoltage to 'Disabled' - default is 'Auto'.

Not sure if you can change this setting in your BIOS but if you can TRY IT!!  My monitor now wakes up alongside the computer after being put in sleep mode with a simple move of the mouse.

I am running Windows 7 on an ASUS P8P67 PRO motherboard with an i7 2600k running an everyday overclock of 4.5Ghz