My workaround for 2001FP monitor stuck in power save or black screen

SUB: My workaround for 2001FP monitor stuck in power save or black screen

My brand new (March 22, 2004) $4,000+ 3.4GHz Extreme Edition XPSGen2 with 2GBytes of RAM, 256MB ATI Radeon 9800 running with a single (not double) link Dell supplied DVI cable at 1600x1200-60Hz, and Dell 2001FP monitor often booted to either a black screen or the display would read "2: Digital Input In Power Save Mode; Press any key on keyboard or move the mouse." Nothing would get it out of this mode except to do a 10-second hold on the computer's power button and then a hard power on reboot. (Ouch! Doing this one time corrupted the OS!)

I appreciate that Dell technical support spent 8 hours to wipe out and reinstall everything on my system, but I was shocked to hear that many Dell LCD flat panel customers are screaming about this same problem. Dell tech support never mentioned this was one of the problems with my system. (The factory had also pinched a power supply wire when they closed the case and the factory had set the BIOS to settings which configured the RAID disc controller incorrectly - to his credit, a Dell tech support guy quickly identified the BIOS settings problem. Also, Dell lost my order twice and almost cancelled it the day it was supposed to ship!)

I have tried all of things mentioned by other customers on the Dell Support web site, such as installing the ATI Catalyst 4.4 video drivers. However, some NVidia video card owners and even a relative I told to buy a Dell with the low end 15 inch Dell Flat Panel running integrated Intel video drivers are having the same problem. Because of this, I doubt the ATI video driver is the problem but it could be a Windows XP switch to monitor driver interaction problem and with how power save mode is switched on and off.

The monitor's power save mode message confused me because I ALWAYS override the Windows default setting that turns the monitor off after 20 minutes. I do this because some games and programs bypass the operating system and I have had Windows turn my monitor off in the middle of disk defragmentation! It appears that the monitor has a default selection in its OSD (on screen display) that automatically puts the monitor in power save mode when ever Windows shuts down.

Since it is nice to have the monitor turn off when you shutdown Windows, I didn't think anything about this until I remembered that many games will switch between resolutions and not wait for the vertical sync period, which makes the switch cleaner and easier for the monitor to resync up. On old CRTs this type of sloppy coding is not a problem but my old analog LCD would go berserk and black out until I hit the adjust or power button. I naively thought DVI would be immune to this problem because it is digital. I tried hitting the adjust button anyways (+ button to left of the power button) and it appeared to do nothing.

I then noticed that the Catalyst Direct 3D control panel allows you to "wait for vertical sync" before making changes. I tried selecting this option but it did not solve the problem. The other selections mentioned in other messages also had no effect either. So I went back to default settings except I left the wait for vertical sync selected.

Finally, I carefully read the 2001FP monitor manual in HTML web page format located on the monitor installation CD-ROM. (Yep, I know tech support guys always think R. T. F(reaking). M. when asked dumb questions by a customer!) I found that the OSD (on screen display) is designed to NOT display when in power save mode!!! Furthermore, the monitor has an option to TURN OFF POWER SAVE for both AUDIO and VIDEO but you can't get to this menu selection unless you have a valid video display!!! What this means it that you might not be able to turn off power save mode if Windows has not successfully turned off the monitor's power save mode!!!

By the way, I discovered Windows was booted even though I could not get a display. Instead of doing a ten-second on the power button emergency shutdown (which risks trashing the OS) I found that I could hit the Windows Key (which is between the left hand Ctrl and Alt keys) wait a second, then hit U and wait a second and then hit either U to turn off the computer or R to restart. Often the display would come on after this reboot.

Fortunately, I was able to occasionally boot up and so I was able to access the OSD and turn off the monitor's power save mode. (To do this, Press the OSD button on the monitor, which is directly to the left of the (-)(+) and power buttons, use the (-)(+) buttons to highlight the AUDIO/VIDEO item, press OSD to select, use (-)(+) to highlight VIDEO, press OSD to select, then use (-)(+) to highlight YES+ (video on during power save) press OSD to select (gray box appears over the YES+), and repeat these steps to set AUDIO to YES+ (if you have the Sound Bar option installed.) Exit the OSD or wait for it to disappear.)

This workaround is not perfect because you will now have to manually use the power button to turn off the monitor after you shutdown the computer. But this is better than switching back to a VGA cable as Dell seems to be recommending. (I hate analog VGA at 1600x1200 because of the pixel jitter and sync problems that are unavoidable since converting a high speed analog signal back to digital form is impossible to do perfectly. This is why I paid extra for a DVI interface!)

NOTE: I shutdown every night and do a hard power up boot each morning - I DO NOT use the Windows hibernation modes because of their poor reliability.

AFTER TURNING OFF THE MONITOR POWER SAVE MODE (see above) HERE IS MY NEW BOOTUP SEQUENCE:

First, I power on the monitor - green power light will turn on - and wait for the monitor's self check display to appear (It is a stack of color bars that is labeled "2: DVI, No input signal" and floats around the screen. If the monitor is in power save mode - amber light on - you will not get the self check display and it means you did not set the OSD AUDIO/VIDEO setting correctly as described above.)

Second, after the monitor is fully powered up, I hit the computer's power button.

So far, I have noticed that the DELL BIOS F2/F12 setup screen comes up faster and longer than before (sometimes I wouldn't even see it display when I had the monitor's default power save enabled) and the black Windows XP boot screen comes up reliably. Both of these screens appear to be at much lower resolutions than 1600x1200 and are probably using default VGA drivers according to other users.

The screen goes black for about 4 seconds after the Windows XP boot screen and then one of two things happens: Either the blue Windows welcome screen appears (I am set up in the one user mode that bypasses the Windows logon screen) and my desktop will appear correctly, or it will screw up.

After changing the monitor AUDIO/VIDEO power save settings, either I will not see the Windows welcome screen and it will display my desktop directly, or the monitor will display its self check screen (but the green power light remains on instead of staying stuck in amber power save mode) and the desktop will appear after a couple of seconds.

Prior to changing the monitor's OSD settings, when it messes up, the monitor's amber power light would go on (meaning it was in power save mode) and apparently the monitor will not display anything, which makes it appear to be locked up. Unlike other monitors I have used, pressing adjust or any other button will not get this monitor out of the power save state even though Windows has successfully booted.

Obviously, this appears to be a serious system engineering problem that Dell should be putting their best engineers on to solve. It would not surprise me if this is an interaction problem between Windows and the way power save is implemented in the monitor. For sure, the monitor's error message to move the mouse to get out of power save mode is TOTALLY STUPID because moving the mouse will solve the problem only if Windows in hibernation mode. When a relative got this message and was unable to get out of it, I incorrectly dismissed it as being a Windows hang error, but it turns out he was NOT in Windows at the time. His experience is also the reason I don't think the problem is only related to the 1600x1200 DVI-mode I am running.

I am NOT so bold to claim that I fully understand what is going wrong or that my workaround will solve the problem, but I am disappointed that Dell seems to be unresponsive to solving this problem. Dell should design a solid engineering solution and give customers with this problem a NEW monitor without bad pixels. It is also inexcusable that my system was shipped with incorrect BIOS settings and a pinched power supply cable that would have probably shorted out if I had not opened the case to check for cables that may have fallen off during shipping.

Before retiring, I worked for Hewlett-Packard for twenty years back when CUSTOMER SERVICE meant something and I once personally air shipped a redesigned, NEW product to customers that had been burned by a product with serious engineering design defects. HP lost a boat load of money on this transaction but they got customers who were willing to buy from HP again despite the hassle factor.

I am so upset with Dell's slow response to this problem that I will never buy from them again. Furthermore, I am telling everybody I know about the poor quality products and service I have gotten from Dell. I now regret telling my father-in-law that buying Dell was like the old adage that "nobody lost their corporate career by buying IBM."

Dell appears to be out of touch with their customers. I currently manage several large stock portfolios and I am SELLING all of the Dell stock because I do not see how they will continue to grow and be profitable with these kinds of quality and customer problems.

At least my system seems to working (for now, knock on wood) and the display is gorgeous when it is working. I've tried running Microsoft Flight Simulator with everything turned on in 1600x1200 32 bit color and I have been unable to bring the CPU to its knees. Because of the 2Gbytes of RAM and large caches, the disk drive is almost never accessed (which makes having a RAID drive unnecessary.) After setting the ATI video control panel to do 4X anti-aliasing, 4X anisotropic and bi-linear filtering, the 3-D real time animations appear almost photo realistic. But I am sure that the game writers are busy figuring out how to use all the "extra" CPU cycles :-)