Aspire V3-571 not providing connected signal to monitor in power save

Question

I recently reconfigured a number of my systems, and ended up with an Acer monitor on my Acer Aspire - the monitor had previously been used with a Dell laptop. You would think two Acer products would work better together, but it's actually slightly worse. When an external monitor is used with VGA, there are three states: the computer is driving video down the wire, the cable is connected but the computer is not sending video, and cable disconnected. The monitor can recognize these states and behave accordingly. The middle state, when the computer is either in power save mode or turned off, is the problem. In such a case, the monitor should simply blank the screen and go into its own power save mode - which it did with my Dell. With the Aspire, the monitor goes into disconnected cable mode (where it displays a moving error message forever) as soon as power save kicks in and the laptop stops sending video. This is no big deal when the laptop is off, since I can just turn off the monitor and save some electricity. But it's really annoying when the computer is on. This is especially true since this same monitor worked perfectly well with the Dell laptop. So the Acer machine is not providing a "proper" signal for some reason. My question is - does anyone know of some configuration option on the Aspire that will cause it to send a signal that the monitor will recognize as power save when the laptop is in that state - or off? Thanks.  

Answer 1

Thanks for the reply. Good suggestion about checking for new drivers - always useful. Alas, there were none, but it did give me a chance to revisit the VESA DPMS spec that governs such things. Described well here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_Display_Power_Management_Signaling I had forgotten that there were two intermediate levels (HSYNC on VSYNC off and the opposite). Obviously On and Off are seen by the monitor, with the latter interpreted as cable disconnect. I just don't seem to get one of the other states from the Aspire like I did from the Dell. The Intel HD4000 chipset in the Aspire claims to support DPMS, it just isn't working the way it worked with the Dell. That machine uses an older Intel graphics chipset. Once I had an oscilloscope in my garage and I could have looked at the pins to see what is being sent to the connector. No longer. I guess I just live with this unless a new driver shows up, or someone comes up with another solution.