Around one year ago I purchased an HP computer with Windows Vista. On my previous computer running Windows XP I used photos from the My Pictures folder as a screensaver and after about half an hour of inactivity the monitor would go to sleep, reawakened by movement of the mouse. However, when I use the Photos screensaver in Windows Vista the monitor does not sleep, although if I select a different screensaver it does go to sleep after the configured period of inactivity. Why is this happening and is it detrimental to the monitor if it does not sleep?

Since the monitor would be running all the time, it can be detrimental if the monitor does not sleep during periods of inactivity (plus it is not particularly energy efficient) so we should get this problem fixed. This is a known problem with Windows Vista relating to the fact that the Windows Vista Photos screensaver opens an audio channel (even though the Photos screensaver does not play audio) and when an audio channel is active the computer is not idle so the monitor will not sleep after the defined period of time because technically the computer is still active. You can find a workaround for this issue at the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article: support.microsoft.com/kb/939617 . Be aware, the article relates to the entire computer not sleeping when using the Photos screensaver, rather than just the monitor sleeping. However, the root cause is the same. Just make sure when you are modifying the power settings that you change “Turn off the display” rather than “Put computer to sleep” (as suggested in the knowledge base article) since you only want to the monitor to sleep rather than the computer to sleep.

However, as you can see all this workaround suggests is that you set the sleep timeout to less than the screensaver timeout, meaning that the display will sleep before the screensaver activates (thus getting around the problem of the computer being active and not idle). However, the implication is that you will never see the screensaver since the monitor will sleep before the screensaver displays. Unfortunately there is no way around this issue, so you may wish to just use a different screensaver which does not suffer from this problem.