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.
