Vista Resolution changes after waking from Sleep Mode - Suggestions?

I am not new to PC's but I am fairly new to Vista and loving it so far on my new notebook. I have only had one BSOD in the three weeks I've been running it and it was caused by an application error and not an OS issue. That being said just bumped into my first issue and I think it's Vista or Nvidia related.

The Issue
My new laptop (Alienware M17x) has a GORGEOUS 17" widescreen display running at a Resolution of 1920x1200. The issues that has popped up is when resuming from sleep mode the resolution defaults back to 1024x768. This happens if the lid is closed or if I click on the sleep button.

This may or may not be significant but It only seamed to have started after hooking up a second display to the HDMI port. Since then I have tried rebooting with and with out a connection to the external HDMI monitor and neither seems to have any bearing on the issue.

The System
Alienware M17x
Nvidia GeForce 8800M GTX (in SLI)
4 gigs ram
Intel Core2 Extreme CPU X9000 @ 2.80GHz
Windows Vista Ultimate (SP1)

Any suggestions gladly accepted! Thanks in advance for any help!

 

Have you tried a new video driver? Go to LaptopVideo2Go.com and find one of the 177.xx series drivers in their forum. It sounds like a driver issue to me.

-J.B.

 

I'm a driver junkie on my desktop machine. Always up to date. I thought with a notebook my safe driver options were limited to the notebook's OEM?

 

When I connected my laptop up to an external display I found the OEM drivers were the most stable. I left my laptop on maximum resolution and set NVidia scaling with fixed aspect-ratio. I also found cloning the two displays worked the best. I left the laptop display as my primary display. I resized the Vista desktop on the external monitor to fit the screen. When I had the settings set just right I exited the NVidia control panel, I disconnected the HDMI connection and rebooted Vista. Vista retained the settings and now when I connect the external display, my saved settings are default.

I guess for trouble shooting purposes you could uninstall the display drivers and install the OEM drivers to clear the settings. See if that fixes the problem with your display dropping to a lower resolution after resuming from sleep.

If this works and you still wish to set up an external display, when you connect the external display you could try the settings that worked for me to set up multiple displays. In the NVidia Control Panel, under "Display" and "Change resolution" leave the settings to the maximum settings of 1920x1200 and under "Change Flat panel scaling" try "NVidia scaling with fixed aspect-ratio", and under "Setup Multiple Displays" 1) "Choose the NView display mode to use" try "Clone" 2) "Select the Display you would like to use" try "Laptop" and 3) "Select the display you want Windows to use as primary" try "Laptop". Now I have to do this from memory since I am not connected to my external display. You should have an option to resize the external display. When you selct this option a NVidia resizing application should be display on your external monitor. Wait for it to be displayed since it might take some time, but it should display. Resize your vista desktop on the external display with the verticle and horizontal sliders. If everything is set up satisfactory, close the control panel and disconnect the HDMI connection and reboot the laptop. Hopefully your laptop's display resolution will hold at 1920 x 1200 when you resume from sleep and your external display will be displayed properly.
I hope this helps.

 

Updating the video drivers solved this for me.

Make sure you uninstall the old ones fully. As a suggestion, uninstall in Safe Mode (taping the F8 key during bootup and choosing safe mode); then try running Driver sweeper.
After install the new drivers in normal/safe mode it don't matter.

 

was doing the exact same thing to me when i was running the laptop with the x3100

but i reinstalled the drivers and it fixed it right up... hope your resolution is just as easy as that.