multicolored screen of death

[escobert]

It seems liek every ngiht when I go to sleep I leave my comp on and it goes to standby and all that good stuff but, when I wake up I get the multicolored screen like when the TV goes out and it's all snow but it has colors in it. I ran some virus scans and I'm not picking anything up. I'm running Windows ME (blah) anyone have any ideas of what to do?

[Flying Mullet]

Shut your computer down at night or install [insert Unne OS promo here].

[Dr Unne]

Tell it not to go to standby. Some computers don't handle standby very well. Have it display a plain black screen saver or something instead.

[escobert]

I've tried to turn stand by off acouple times but it still goes on stand by. I'll try it again though. Thanks.

[crono_logical]

That sounds like the "Flying through Space" screen saver to me

You might want to check in the BIOS too - even if you tell Windows not to use standby, it might still standy if it's set in the BIOS.

[escobert]

I was just up in my room for 45 min or so playing GC and when I came back down to the computer I got the screen again. The PC wasn't on stand by either. Could it be something with ME? I've been having a lot of HD problems with PC since I got it. When I went to Europe it got hit with a power surge and friend most of it. New mother board, processor, HD, power supply, fan. At first I thought it might be trillian since I didn't have the problem since I started using trillian again but it does it even when I'm not running trillan.

[DMKA]

I had this happen to my 200MHZ machine several times. Incidentally, I had it running under Windows ME as well...

I'm not sure how to fix it besides what I did, and what I did was reformatted the hard drive (seems like thats the only way to solve Windows ME problems I've discovered as of late). After that I told it not to go into standby and it pretty much stopped happening after that...

Another thing that can cause this is a bad stick of ram, believe it or not...my cousin's comp was doing it and it ended up being bad ram...then we replaced it and everything was fine after that, and you said it was fried, correct? Usually ram and soundcard are the first to get fried by lightning so you may want to see if its the ram...other than that I'm not sure what it could be...

All in all, however, I'd say your best bet is to just go to the control panel, power opitions and set everything to "never"...that pretty much solves it altogether.

[escobert]

I'll check the RAM when I wake up. It's not a big deal since I'm ordering my new PC in the morning ohhh I can't wait. Thanks for the help.

[crono_logical]

Turn the old one into a linux box In fact, get the Gentoo Linux Live CD (pick any mirror and look in releases/x86/2004.1/livecd ), and use the memtest86 program on there in the boot menu to test your RAM before installing

[Baloki]

Oh great, your all just silly, most new-ish monitors if you leave them off with no signal they show a cycle of colours to stop the screen burning out and so you know its on, its a safety thing...

[escobert]

But it's on with a signal and it does it and it doesn't come off unless you restart the computer.

[Baloki]

The computer doesn't give out a signal while its in standby mode but it tells the monitor that its on, therefore making the monitor think that its on but the computer isn't, try not using standby mode and just using shutdown, you don't gain anything from standby bar you can lose aload of data if the power goes out, so why not bother with a full shutdown?

[escobert]

Just too lazy to shut it down. Also I usually watch a movie while I'm falling alseep. Now I get what you meant by that. I Turned standby off the other day and it seems to be working. But I think it might be the RAM because I'm running into a lot of memory problems lately

[crono_logical]

Whenever I play videos, I find all power saving is temporarily disabled until the video stops/gets paused, which is rather convenient Might be an MPC/Xine thing though.

[escobert]

Ok now I'm having memory problems here'e that pic of my RAM showing I have 255