5 Posts

April 23rd, 2007 12:00

I have very similar problem I describe today: See thread "D520 resolution fall back on Vista". Are you using docking station or connecting to external display frequently?

4 Posts

April 23rd, 2007 12:00

No, I am not using any docking station or connection to an external display. This is the actual laptop screen that flickers and then changes resolution.

5 Posts

April 23rd, 2007 13:00

I have Vista Ultimate too. The problem looks Microsoft specific. Only good news to you that you are not alone :)

4 Posts

April 23rd, 2007 13:00

I am using Vista Ultimate. I've looked through all the settings and nothing seems relevant to this issue. I've seen mentions of this identical problem on the vista community forum, but no one seems to get any responses from the "experts".

5 Posts

April 23rd, 2007 13:00

OK. Because the symptom is totally same (coming back from standby the system change to the lower resolution automatically), it is seems that the problem is not related to Docking, external display, and not given notebook specific and video card specific. In this case what else? Are you using Vista as well?

April 27th, 2007 10:00

OK guys .... I think there might be a solution but I don't know how to implement it.  (I have the same problem on a D420 with the intel 945 chipset and the abosultely hopeless Intel Graphics media accelerator driver).  If you look at any of the fairly recent Intel driver downloads for this chipset (unfortuntaley not drivers that are validated for the Dell's yet), the readme files show that there are some switches you can set when installing from the setup.exe file.  One of those switches allows the default resolution to be set - my bet is that Someone at Dell has defaulted this for safety reasons to 1024*768. 
My Intel accelerator driver which came installed on the machine in March is 7.14.10.1147   Unfortuntaley the latest driver on the Dell downloads page, predates this so device manager will not let me install the older one to try and use this default resolution switch idea.
 
Here's a link to the Readme file for the latest Intel driver download - you can see the idea of the switches under section 6.  http://downloadmirror.intel.com/df-support/13185/ENG/installation_readme154.txt
 
Intel by the way are up to 7.14.10.1255   it would be nice if Dell got their finger out a bit on this one.
 
I think this graphics accelerator driver is very poor - apart from the naff interface, I think it is also preventing any user defined colour management - ie on the native notebook monitor it is not allowing any user profile to be used, and is overriding it with its own colour management which you can set by tweeking the red green and blue manually.
 
Shame really as it's a nice computer
Mike

24 Posts

March 7th, 2008 21:00

The actual culprit is TMM, Vista's process that looks for multiple monitors and attempts to intelligently modify resolution. If you aren't using multiple monitors, you can disable TMM:

1. right-click on 'computer' and select 'manage'
2. on the left pane, expand 'task scheduler' then ' task scheduler library' then 'Microsoft' then 'Windows' then 'MobilePC'
3. select TMM in the center pane, then on the right pane, choose 'disable'

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