Vista = screwy notebook on battery power.

OK guys weird problem I had today. A notebook I use at work has Vista premium. I have never really used the notebook on battery power but today I did. Anyway about 10 minutes into using it on battery power, the screen went wacky with all kinds of colors and lines etc.. A simple restart fixed the problem but sure enough about 20 minutes later it did it again. I restarted again and then plugged it in to its power source. Plugged in I couldn't replicate the problem.

I decided to do a clean install of XP on this machine (I was planning to anyway.) 2 hours later after XP was all setup I decided to give it a try on battery power. The problem never surfaced.

Any ideas? This is not a vista VS xp post so please leave those type of responses out of the thread. I am genuinely interested in what the problem could be. Anyone think I should reinstall vista and see if the problem still exist?

Thanks

 

Sounds like a display driver problem to me. Check if there's a newer or more stable version available.

 

a display driver problem that only surfaces on battery power?

 

I dunno. I sometimes get a black screen for a couple seconds and then it comes back to normal with a message that my display driver crashed and recovered (or was restarted or something). And it seems to happen more often on battery although I'm not sure now if I'm just imagining that. But I don't find it that surprising because the system is doing different stuff on battery, the cpu is changing speeds (and maybe the gpu too), and race conditions could be triggered that aren't triggered on AC power.

Then again it could be something else...

 

yeah its gotta be the drivers. Its what causes most of the problems and crashes in Vista according to statistics.

 

If you hate vista then whatever you do with vista will be screwy.

 

A significant fraction of early display drivers for Vista were beta quality (at best). That was probably why Vista crashed.

 

Yup. Sounds like a driver to me. But who knows, considering how complex computers are. Like for me, once every two weeks I'll get a random BSOD when I resume my laptop. I can't seem to narrow it down since it is such a rare BSOD. God knows what it could be...

 

Seems like a driver.May be the graphics card downclock too much?