my laptop screen goes black and will not wake up following 2026-08 Security Update (KB5121003) (26200.9168)

Question

my laptop screen goes black and will not wake up following 2026-08 Security Update (KB5121003) (26200.9168)

allison whiteley 5

My laptop screen goes black and will not wake up when the laptop goes into sleep mode. This has been happening since the update 2026-08 Security Update (KB5121003) (26200.9168) on 12th August. The only way to get back into the laptop is to do a hard reboot.

I have tried the ctl,alt B. I have tried updating the graphics driver. Any ideas

jesús miguel garcia ortigosa 0 Reputation points

2026-08-31T16:54:35.7666667+00:00

Same issue here. Lenovo Legion, RTX 5080 Laptop GPU, driver 610.88. Screen would go black/flicker randomly for a couple seconds and then recover on its own.

Started happening right after KB5121003 installed on my machine (Aug 13). Before that, 7 months with this laptop, zero issues like this ever.

Here's what I think is actually going on: this laptop normally does a brief screen blackout/flicker whenever you physically plug in or unplug the charger - that's expected, it's the GPU switching power states to handle the new power delivery. But after KB5121003, the exact same flicker started happening without me touching the charger at all, while it just sat connected the whole time. So something in this update is triggering that same internal power-state transition on its own, without the actual physical event that's supposed to cause it.

Spent a couple days ruling out other causes before landing on this - checked GPU temps (happened even at 59°C, so not thermal), removed a small manual overclock I had (+100MHz core, still happened without it), tried it with heavy GPU load off entirely (still happened at idle too). None of that changed anything.

What actually stopped it: uninstalled KB5121003, paused updates, restarted. It's been almost two weeks since then with zero incidents, in the exact same conditions that used to trigger it constantly (had multiple browser/app windows open at the same time, which seemed to make it worse before).

Not in the official known issues list for this KB as far as I can tell, so figured I'd add my case here since it's a pretty specific hardware combo (high-power laptop dGPU) that might not show up in normal QA testing.

Quick note on the "hybrid sleep" suggestion above - I don't think that's related in this case. This isn't a sleep/wake issue, it happens while the system is fully awake and running. And a laptop generally won't let the GPU run at full power/performance without AC actually connected in the first place - battery mode caps that on its own. So whatever's causing this is tied to the AC power delivery state itself, not to how the system sleeps or wakes up.

2 answers

Your answer

Answer 1

Hi. I'm David, and I'm happy to help you.

This behavior can occur for several reasons. It is necessary to investigate.

Please export and share the log for analysis:

Press Windows + X and select Event Viewer;
Expand Windows Logs and select System;
In the Actions panel on the right, select Filter Current Log;
In Event level, check the boxes Critical, Warning, and Error and click on Ok;
Again, in the Actions panel, select Save Filtered Log File As and save in an easily accessible place.

Then, upload the file to the cloud (OneDrive), choose to share it, and get the link.

Post the link to the file here so I can have a look.

Looking forward to your reply.

Answer 2

Since updating the graphics driver and using Windows + Ctrl + Shift + B did not help, the next supported steps are:

Disable Fast Startup
- Open Control Panel.
- Go to Power Options.
- Select Choose what the power buttons do.
- Select Change settings that are currently unavailable.
- Under Shutdown settings, clear Turn on fast startup.
- Save the change, then restart the laptop and test sleep again.
Check display mode after wake
- Press Windows + P, then press P again and Enter to cycle display modes.
- This can recover the screen if the update changed display output selection.
Use the standard blank-screen recovery steps
- Make sure the laptop is connected to power.
- Try Ctrl + Alt + Del. If the security screen appears, open Task Manager and restart Windows Explorer.
- If the system remains stuck, press and hold the power button for 20 seconds to force restart.
If the issue is tied specifically to sleep, turn off hybrid sleep if that option is available
- Open Control Panel > Power Options.
- Open the current plan settings, then Advanced power settings.
- Under Sleep, set Allow hybrid sleep to Off.
Reinstall the laptop maker’s graphics driver version
- Since a normal driver update already failed, install the graphics driver version provided on the laptop manufacturer’s support page rather than a generic newer one.

The context also shows black-screen wake issues can be related to display/graphics behavior after sleep or lid-close events, and in some Windows versions Microsoft resolved similar cases through specific updates. If this started immediately after the August update, the most relevant self-service path is to test with Fast Startup off and hybrid sleep off first.