Screensaver kicking in too early with external display (VGA)

This only started happening last night, and I've used it with the tv a few times and not had this.
I connect it using the VGA connector...and I had it plugged into the power, yet the screensaver would come on every 15 minutes, which is what the battery power settings were. So I changed the battery power screen saver settings to 1 hour, and it still happened. The whole time Im still plugged in to the power!
Anyone have any ideas why!?
I'll see if it happens again tonight, and whether it happens without the tv plugged in (too tired to test it at 1am this morning!)

I checked the forum and see this:
VGA output noise
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/VGA-output-noise/m-p/1596622#M98647
I think what I saw is the exact same problem mentioned in this thread. But how should I fix it?
Thanks.

Similar Messages

MacBook Pro 13" Early 2011 - External display issues

I have an early 2011 MacBook Pro 13" (2.7GHz version) that I am using with an external non-Apple display. I am having issues when MBP goes to sleep or trys to sleep the display. The external display exibits one of a number of problems: goes dark but does not power off the backlight or freezes up and requires being powered off then back on. My display is an ASUS VW266H but it seems like this problem, or other similar problems, are happening with other non-Apple displays.
In calling Apple tech support of 5/27/11 they indicated that this is a known bug and they are working on a fix. There was software update released 5/4/11 to "improve graphics stability, address issues with external display" named MacBook Pro Software Update 1.4 (http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1382). I downloaded this and applied it but it made no difference.
I experienced these problems with three different video adapters: Apple's own mini DP to DVI, Belkin mini DP to HDMI and another brand of mini DP to HDMI also sold by the Apple store.
So the questions are:
1) Will Apple release another updated to address this incompatability or are they done with the issue given that they released the update mentioned above?
2) Has anyone compiled a list of monitors that are know to work with these most recent MacBook Pros (the early 2011 versions with the Thunderbolt/mini DP combined ports)?
If you have used the MacBook Pro 13" early 2011 with an external monitor please respond to this post with your experiences so we can all know what works.

With my new 2011 13" MBP I'm having no latency issues using my '08 Samsung SyncMaster 2253BW DVI (digital) monitor. Sleep function awakens fine, goes to sleep 3-4 sec.
I'm using a cheapie model Syba MDP to DVI connector; here on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Syba-High-Quality-DisplayPort-Adapter/dp/B00342UT02/ref=sr _1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1307389450&sr=8-1
I bought 2 in case one craps out on me...knock on wood. Good luck hope you find a solution.

No Wireless Internet with External Display, Other Issues

Hello,
When I connect an external monitor to my MBA, I lose my connection to the Internet. The wi-fi signal remains strong, but pages will not load (I tried many) and I cannot retrieve email. The connection times out when I try to ping as well. This occurs whether I have the MBA open or closed. The loss of Internet happens immediately when I connect an external display using the supplied dongle, and returns the moment I disconnect it. It is clearly an issue with external displays.
On the advice of an Apple Genius, I also tried disabling bluetooth. I did so, and turned off all my bluetooth devices (Apple keyboard and mouse, iPhone), but the problems persist.
The other trouble I am having is difficulty connecting to a network for the first time in a session. In other words, I was connected all day yesterday, take the MBA home, and return to the office the next day. MBA takes a long time to see the network, then fails to accept the password. If I carry the MBA closer to the wireless router, it finds and connects automatically as I'd saved my password. When I return to my desk, I remain connected with full signal strength. This has happened in two locations, one with an Airport Extreme, the other with a Netopia 802.11g router. When my Macbook Pro is sitting right next to the MBA, it recognizes and connects to the same networks almost instantaneously.
Anyone have any suggestions? Much appreciated.

Just a quick update... I was on the phone with Apple Support on Saturday morning and I thought we were making progress. The basic idea behind the proposed solution was that there was some "Preferences" that were causing the problem. We started over with a clean Preferences folder and tried connecting up the external monitor. At first, this approach was showing progress. The suggestion was to copy over my original Preferences (I had made a backup copy) just a few at a time until we figured out which ones caused the problem. The problem with this approach is that immediately after I got off the phone, the internet started not to work again. So, even with a clean Preferences folder, the internet would quit working after connecting up the external monitor.
So, I'm back to the drawing board. I have since restored my Preferences folder and I don't have my external monitor and internet working at the same time. BTW, I also upgraded to 10.5.3 and it didn't help.
Still bummed,
Kevin

Help with external displays

Just installed Lion and afterward I noticed that things work differently with external displays. In the past I could have my laptop open to mirror but now it must be shut and the mirrior button or selection isn't available within the display preferences. So my question is, 1. does any one know how to better manage displays? and 2. does anyone know how to mirror while having the laptop screen open?
I know trhis sounds petty but where I work it is very hot and it seems like with the screen shut the computer syncs heat away a lot less efficiently.
Thanks

Thanks,
I now know how to turn on and off mirrioring with command/F1 (didn't know that yet), but would you know how I can use my external display in mirror mode with the laptop display completely turned off, not dimmed till black, but off?
Before lion I was able to do this by shutting the laptop screen which would put the machine into sleep mode and then by clicking the mouse or hitting a key on the keyboard it would wake it. Once the external display came on then I would open the laptop and the laptop display would remain off while using the external display. Hope that makes sense. Any suggestions?

MBP Retina low performance with external displays

Hi everyone!
I have a very bad performance with my MBP 15´´ retina display when it comes to ad an external display. I have a FUL HD LG monitor that looks very bad when i connect the HDMI or the thunderbot port with the proper adapter (as bad as you can´t even read). I want to know if this may ba a hardware problem just with my computer or if it is a software problem, any ideas? does anyone have the same issue?
How can i update my NVIDIA card???
Thanks a lot!

Topic seems to come up here often. Apple has a tendency to dismiss the issue.
Its a pretty well known problem that Mac font smoothing doesn't seem to work well on high resolution third party external displays, making text hard to read. In addition, I think the Mac HDMI resolution support is limited to 1080p, so you must use DP or DVI video interfaces to see full monitor resolution.
The OS default is no font smoothing on external displays (except perhaps the apple display). There is a terminal command that will enable font smoothing for any external monitor, but it often doesn't work well enough. I found that using the OS zoom feature magnifies text to the point to be easily readable. You can set zoom parameters in the accessibility systems preference panel.
For some reason, sometimes the Mac OS thinks some monitors are TVs and use YCbCr instead of RGB. You can open the color sync utility and brouse the settings to see what is being used. There are scripts available that can fix that but are more complicated to install than an app.
It seems that PCs are way ahead of Macs with external display implementation. Most folks having monitor problems with a Mac do not see the same issue with PCs or Unix/Linux OSs.
Oh as far as updating the video card, can't. The monitor "drivers" are built into the OS. When a new display is connected, the OS finds the profile for it.

Gnone 3.6 screensaver with external display

hi
I have contected external display to my laptop. LID is off and I am using only external display.
I did setupt to "turn screen off when inactive for 5 minutes" in System settings -> Brightness & lock.
but my display is still switch on.
any idea?

thanks
yes, it is enabled
it is bit strange, sometimes it is working okay, sometimes not, maybe some "new" feature of gnome :-)
Last edited by jancici (2012-11-19 21:03:32)

Problem with external displays

I've an issue with my MBP 15'' Early 2013. Recently I'd the GPU problem and my logic board was replaced. Everything worked fine as usual but I never tried to connect it to an external display.
When I first connected a projector after the logic board change via a VGA adapter I wan unable to make it work, the computer had one of this two problems:
Screen goes black and nothing works
Computer gets too slow and I can't do anything but move the cursor
Then I tried with a TV via HDMI and everything worked fine. I tried then with an external monitor, another projector and a TV with VGA and nothing worked.
I searched in internet and most of the people has this problem with both VGA and HDMI. But I didn't found anyone with only the VGA problem.
I tried resetting the PRAM, changing resolution to all the available ones and nothing worked.
Before the logic board was replaced the external displays worked great.
Any idea?
Thank you!

Hey, I had something similar happening with my i5 going to a Dell U2410, but my connection was via HDMI. When I got that distortion however I could not recover from it and had to reboot my laptop. I switched to an analog connector & noticed the occasional flicker to black, almost like my cable was loose and got bumped, but it recovered fine each time. I'm testing now with a dvi cable, and so far no issues *knock on wood*. Sorry, no fix, but maybe try a different connection and see if it improves things for you.
Cheers!

Update to 10.6.8 colour problems with external display

I have a mid-2010 13" macbook pro. I use a mini DVI to HDMI adaptor to connect to my Philips LCD TV. It has always worked perfectly including audio. Since update to 10.6.8 (yesterday) there is a colour-cast on the external display that makes it unusable. I have tried a hard reset of the mac with no effect except that the colour cast changed from green to red (strange!).
Anyone had a similar problem or have any ideas how I could solve it? (no time machine so I can't downgrade unfortunately)

Though I am using and iMac 27 and not a macbook, I have the similar issues since the 10.6.8 update.
I too am using the adapter to connect to a Philips 42' LCD.
You can see my post here: (has a pic of what my TV image now looks like since update.)
https://discussions.apple.com/message/15488605#15488605
I ended up going back to 10.6.7, not a fix, but no other alternative..
I used to have this problem a year ago on a PC that happened to have the same ATi Graphics card. I just used the ATI control center and changed a setting to YBR component or something like that in some color settings. But unfortunately we don't have the ATI control panel for mac, least I don't think we have any kind of alternative, but would prolly fix it..

Images too dark on external display

Hello,
I use Lightroom on my (Lenovo) notebook. Because of the small screen size, I tried using it with an external (Samsung) display. However, when I open Lightroom on the external display, all the images suddenly seem way too dark. It is the case that this display is generally too dark, because when I view the same picture in a photo viewer or a browser it is not too dark. See for example this screenshot. On the left hand you see an image (export from Lightroom) in my browser, on the right hand the same image in Lightroom. You can clearly see it is much darker. When I view both images on the screen of the notebook itself, there is no difference between them.
Actually, when I move the Lightroom window from the notebook display to the external display, you can clearly see Lightroom adjusting the images from light to dark.
Does anyone know what causes this, and how I can prevent Lightroom from showing the images too dark?
Thanks!

I guess you misunderstood my problem. It's not only that images on the external display are way darker than on the notebook, but also that on the external display images in Lightroom are much darker than when I view the same image on the same display in a photo viewer or a browser. In the screenshot pictured above both the light and the dark version of the image are on the same external display.
However, in the meantime I found a solution. Changing the Windows Color System device profile to a non-WCS-profile did the trick: Photos appear as black, gray rectangles | Lightroom | Windows
Thanks anyway for trying to help.

How to stop sleep/hibernation with external display & lid down

What is the proper way to get my MBA to not sleep, hibernate, etc. when I have an external display attached and lid closed while watching a movie or webcast. In such a case I am not touching the mouse, trackpad, or keyboard.
I have bluetooth keyboard and usb wireless mouse attached.
I also disabled the sleep/poweroff options in the energy settings while watching.
The MBA still would go to sleep or something after 10 or 15 minutes of no agitation.
Also, the Monitor goes blank since their is not signal coming through to it.
Was this just not a use case that was thought through: Watch video stream with external monitor and lid closed? Make sure the MBA knows this scenario invalidates the powersave options????? And yes, the power was plugged.
Thanks

Caffeine puts a little coffee cup icon at the top bar. Click to turn it off and on - it is on when the cup is dark, ie has coffee in it. However, this won't solve your problem - the MBA will still sleep with the lid closed. There are settings to allow use of an external monitor but what I did was download InsomniaX. This little free app keeps your computer from going to sleep when you close the lid. That way you can close the lid, walk down a hall or do something, then open the lid and keep working. Just don't forget it is on and leave the Mac too long or it will run out of battery.
Insomnia isn't in the App store, had to download it at http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/22211/insomniax

Folder action kicks in too early

I have a little applescript that is to add all files that are added to a specific folder to an iTunes playlist.
I added the script as a folder action to the folder.
It seems to work fine with single files.
However, when I copy several files (which takes a few seconds), then the script gets started too early, i.e., when only half of the files have been copied over. Consequently, only some of the files get added to the playlist.
In addition, when I copy a large number of files, it doesn't seem to work at all.
Any ideas what's wrong? or what I can do?
(Is this a bug in Mac OS? I read about an issue in 10.5 where folder actions got started before a single files was finished copying, but I haven't seen of any hints about my problem.)
Any kind of help will be highly appreciated.
Best regards,
Gabriel.
PS:
Here is my script, for completeness
Automatically add the files that are dropped on this applescript to
playlist named below.
To adapt it for a different playlist, just change the name below and save as application.
In addition, you can add this script as a folder action
Author: Gabriel Zachmann, Feb 2010
property playListName : "Hoerspiele"
on open theseFiles
addTheFiles(theseFiles)
end open
on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items
addTheFiles(added_items)
end adding folder items to
to addTheFiles(theFiles)
tell application id "com.apple.iTunes"
activate
set playL to some playlist whose name is playListName
set playID to persistent ID of playL
--display dialog ("persistent ID = " & playID) buttons {"OK"} default button 1
reveal (some playlist whose persistent ID is playID)
repeat with aFile in theFiles
try
add aFile to some playlist whose persistent ID is playID
end try
-- set new date, so we know later when we copied the files
set the file_path to the quoted form of the POSIX path of aFile
do shell script ("/bin/touch " & file_path)
end repeat
end tell
end addTheFiles
Message was edited by: GabrielZ

folder actions have always been buggy and this has always been an issue when folder actions have to process many files at the same time. it's supposed to have gotten better in snow leopard but it's still very far from being reliable. you can try the following trick to slow down your folder action and make it wait to process individual items before they are all copied. that might (or might not ) help
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8277780#8277780

3D acceleration with external display

I was wondering how the 3D acceleration works with an external display (20" or 24" dell LCDs)? Does the GMA 950 still use only 64MB RAM, and if so, is it enough for supporting the higher resolution?

Hello!
1. 64MB ram is locked by firmware and there are no known workarounds or even attempts at workarounds.
2. 64MB ram is fine for display spanning, but not enough for 3D games. But honestly, how many cards can do 1680X1050 3D without costing a fortune?
3. Probably of most interest to you, the GMA 950 is too slow to power 3D at that resolution. But I have a Dell 20" 2005WFP and I don't have any problems running games at lower resolution. So you can definitely play your games, just without the eye candy.
For example, I can run Medal of Honor (yeah I know it's old) in BootCamp with ALL settings maxed out at 1024x640 and it looks fantastic on the external monitor. This is significantly better than my Inspiron 6000's ATI mobility X300 with 64MB of ram.

Solution for sleep issues with external display?

I had an Early 2011 Macbook Pro that worked quite well with an external display. I now have a Mid 2012 Macbook Pro (bought 5 days ago, and running 10.10.3) that will not consistently work with the same external monitor.
I had it working yesterday for a few hours only if I left the MBP with the top open (both the MBP screen and external monitor stayed lit). But, today it is back to freezing each time the monitor is connected to it.
I have tried:
1. Connecting the external monitor to the MBP with the top open. Results in the MBP screen now going dark and no signal being passed to the external monitor. If the external monitor is disconnected, the MBP screens stays dark and the computer is unresponsive requiring a hard restart.
2. Connecting the external monitor to the MBP with the top closed. Results in no signal being sent to the external monitor. Disconnecting the external monitor and reopening the MBP yields, again, and unresponsive computer which requires a hard restart.
I have tried three different external monitors, all giving the same result. The MBP is connect to external power, and I am running the latest OS (10.10.3).
Any suggestions before I return this to the Apple store in a rage? :-)

Hello there, Gaflin.
I'm sorry to hear you're having so much trouble getting your external display to work the way you are expecting with your new MacBook Pro. The following Knowledge Base article provides a great checklist of steps for troubleshooting the issue you seem to be describing:
Apple computers: Troubleshooting issues with video on internal or external displays - Apple Support
No video or no signal, image distortion, "snow," or flickering
Check connections
When using an external display be sure to check the following:
If you're using an Apple notebook, confirm the AC power cable or adapter is securely connected to the computer and the cable providing power to the display is also secure. It is always good to have your notebook connected to AC power when an external display is in use.
Confirm display adapters are fully seated in their respective connections and that they are supported models and for the computer and display. Refer to these articles to assist you with adapter compatibility and further configuration information:
Monitor and Display Adapter Table
About Mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapters
Apple Mini DisplayPort adapters: Frequently asked questions (FAQ)
Thunderbolt ports and displays: Frequently asked questions (FAQ)
Remove all display cable extenders, KVM switches, or other like devices and retest to determine if the issue is resolved.
Try unplugging the video adapter or cable and then plug it back in.
If more than one video adapter is in use (or "daisy-chained"), troubleshoot by using only one adapter.
Example: A mini DisplayPort to DVI adapter connected to a DVI to HDMI adapter is an unsupported configuration because there is a series of adapters in use.
If available, try using a different display and or adapter (or use a different connector by using DVI instead of VGA, for instance).
Reset the system
You can reset the Mac's parameter RAM and SMC.Reset the resolution
Start by resetting the Mac's parameter RAM. If the display does not come up, was previously set to an unsupported resolution, and still results in no video:
Start up in Safe Mode.
From the Apple () menu, choose System Preferences.
Choose Displays from the View menu to open the preferences pane.
Select any resolution and refresh rate that your display supports.
Restart your computer.
Using Closed lid, Extended Desktop, or Mirroring display modes
When using multiple displays, information can be presented in a number of ways. For more information and what modes are supported by your Apple product refer to:
Apple Portables: How to use your computer in closed lid (display closed) mode with an external display
How to use multiple displays with your Mac
Thanks for reaching out to Apple Support Communities.
Cheers,
Pedro.

Macbook pro retina quit working with external displays

Just got a new external display, and can't get it to work with my MBP. I tried it via the mini display port and also via the HDMI connection. Then I tried to use my flatscreen tv just to test things out via HDMI and now that doesn't work either, I've done that quite a bit in the past. The only thing thats changed is I updated to Yosemite. I even tried different cables.
Thoughts?
Txs,
Jeff

When I unplug the cable from the mac, the monitor does display this message:
"No Display Port Cable"
So it does seem like the display knows that its connected to a mac, just nothing shows up. Don't get anything in System Prefs > Displays either.

MacBook Pro with external display sometimes

I want to use my MacBook Pro with my external display (Apple 23 inch Cinema) when I'm at my office, and to have Spaces set up and optimized for that. When I'm at home or on the road, I want Spaces set up differently, optimized for the MacBook Pro display only (no external display). Can I do this? Do I need to set up separate accounts on the MBP to do this, or can I do it some other way? Can you have sets, or multiple instances of Spaces? Otherwise, I want both options -- at work with MBP display plus Apple 23 inch Cinema or MBP display only -- to be able to access all of my files and software. The only real difference in the two setups would be the amount of screen real estate and where/how Spaces works within these different screen "landscapes."

You will always have to use the power button to turn it on, and you'll have to open the display for that.
Apple supports using the machine with its display closed, provided you follow the instructions in this article. As long as you do that, it shouldn't cause any harm. But I wouldn't recommend seeing how hot you can get the MBP with the display closed.

Screensaver kicking in too early with external display (VGA)

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for