Screen wont turn off and no screen saver

Upgraded to Win 11 but was doing it on Win 10 too. Was working fine and then the screen would turn off for a few seconds and then the mouse led would light up and the screen would come back on and stay on. Try setting a screen saver and it only worked once and now it wont even come on. I try changing the time until it goes off and changed Power mode for performance to balanced. Computer is Alienware R9. Basically I have to turn the PC off when I am not using it so I dont wreck my screen.

 

Sounds like something is triggering the idle timer to reset as if there were movement. I'd be looking more towards a scan of the system for malware / virus at this point.

 

Thanks. Can you recommend a free program that might work? I recall doing a scan once that the program ran in dos mode or without windows running

 

I would make the attempt at a fresh install if you cant figure it out. If it happened under 10 as well as 11 then could just be something that was brought along during the upgrade.

 

https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/forHome/products/housecall.html
https://www.eset.com/us/home/online-scanner/
https://www.f-secure.com/us-en/home/free-tools/online-scanner
https://www.malwarebytes.com/solutions/virus-scanner
https://www.bitdefender.com/toolbox/

I haven't used a AV installed in years and rarely have issues with anything intruding but, when something isn't quite right a scan to identify the issue helps. I tend to just do a clean install instead of mucking around with AV scanners most of the time. With all of the clutter from patches / updates / upgrades it's easier to just start over periodically for better performance.

Most of the stuff out there though is benign other than being annoying like your sleep timer. I did have one instance of a patcher program trying login to several bank accounts that triggered a bunch of alerts to come in where it was easier to reinstall the OS vs tracking down what the issue was. Of course I ended up going through each site and generating random complex passwords for all of them and not just the affected ones.

 

Ok so I removed the CPU and it appears there was some thermal paste inside the CPU socket pins. I cleaned it with alcohol and a toothbrush. Upon reassembly I had bent a pin or 2. After carefully fixing them using my smartphone camera zoomed in and a toothpick [that looked like a log] I got it to post again. Now I get screen saver and screen with shut off. I bought this machine second hand so the original owner must have been overzealous with the paste. So glad it working now as I was wondering if it had some type of hardware failure.

 

Good job! Paste can be a blessing or a curse. I just got sick of cleaning it up for perfection and went with graphite pads instead on laptop and server. Easier to deal with when you have to peal back the layers to troubleshoot / upgrade down the road.