Help with screen shows black when start up on Battery!

I just put together my 1029 on Wednesday night, Let me say that everything went together perfectly.

Installed XP Pro, I installed all the divers from the MSI disk.

The 1029 is very fast, everything works well, but if I unplug the power and start it cold from just battery power, it seems like it boots up fine, but I can't see anything but the mouse, the rest is just black.

Now if I plug it in and reboot, everything is fine.

I have tried both the ati drivers from the cd, and also the 5.11 from ati.

Same thing with both.

Has anyone here experienced this black screen problem?

Any info would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Here are some pics of my 1029 if yall want to check it out.
1029 pics

 

What brand of memory are you using and how many sticks. If it's just one, which slot is it in, upper or lower? Also, which BIOS version is installed?

 

The bios is unchanged from how it shipped, ver 2.30 I think.
I'll have to restart to check.

The ram is VIKING 1GB 200-Pin DDR SO-DIMM DDR 333
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16820141520

Ram is in slot 1, the lower one.

I want to flash the bios, but I can't figure out how to make the boot image.

If anyone has an img file, I would love to have a copy.

Also my power setting is set to notebook/portable.

 

Don't suppose you have a USB floppy drive?

 

No, not yet.

I've read that someone made one on a bootable cd.

 

I'm starting to think it's something with the ati drivers, can someone with a working 1029 post links to drivers that are working for them?

Also I'm trying to figure out how to make a bootble cd to so I can flash my bios to ver 2.5, everything I've tried so far has not worked, if someone has an image file, can you please email it to me.

 

It's definately possible to make a bootable CD to flash your BIOS with. There's one disadvantage to doing it this way: you cannot backup your current BIOS, so if something goes wrong, you are completely screwed. When you go to burn a CD, there should be an option to make CD bootable. Check the option and you should be good.

 

Ok I'll check into it, but I think I've tried that already, with nero, chose boot cd option, copied my files from a bootable flopy on my desktop system, then burned it, but no luck.

I'm just going to buy a floppy drive.

I think I fixed my black screen problem, it seems like I installed the latest Catalyst from ati and it caused the problem, I just re-installed the ati drivers from my MSI disk and now everything works again.

 

The latest Catalyst 6.3 driver will cause the black screen problem, however there is a way to get around it. Go open the Advanced driver setting, and disable Powerplay. Powerplay doesn't save that much battery power (negligible) and it causes problems. Better to downclock and undervolt the CPU to reduce power consumption.

 

There is no fix for this problem, apart from turning off the Powerplay feature of the Catalyst 6.3 drivers.

There is a work around that will allow you to save battery power. Download the ATI Tool utility and use it to lower the GPU & Memory frequencies. I managed to get mined down to around 215mhz, without any performance deficiencies, when using 2D apps.

Set the utility to run at full speed when 3D apps are detected. I usually get about 2.5 hours of battery life if WIFI is turned off. Before that, I could barely manage just over 1.0 hour.

Hope this helps.
Claude