Two monitors on Vista

[John_Nevill]

I've been singing praise for Vista for almost 6 months now and today I found a curious little bug!

I hooked a second LCD panel to my Radeon X series graphics card, profiled it using an eye one display 2 and all seemed well.

I now have two colourmatched and calibrated monitors! Thats until the screen saver or power save kicks in. For some reason the gamma tables are reset and the individual profiles are lost.

I've had to resort to using gretag's displayprofile utility to re-intialise the profiles.

A bit of surfing confirmed my findings and although not acknowledged by M$, I undertsand it will be fixed in Vista SP1, whenever that arrives.

[Edward Bussa]

Don't Give Up On Vista! (if you've seen the commercial)

I've had my battles with Vista at work regarding video cards also. It seems they've re-written the dual-monitor support and they no longer support two different brand video cards (one on each monitor) to "simplify the stack".

Long story short, I've noticed odd behavior (takes a long time) coming back from power save/screen saver as well.

Asta la vista Vista! For now baby. Next year about this time will probably be when I finally move to Vista...

[Ray West]

Hi John,

I guess you are using the screen saver to prevent image persistence. This apple link explains why that is not such a good idea http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=10639. (not apple monitor specific, but backlit lcd displays in general)

My display has a timer built into it, (which I do not use) it also has an on/off button on the front ;-), maybe best to use that until Vista gets sorted. Presumably you do not lose the profiles if the whole system is powered off, how about in standby?.

Best wishes,

Ray

[John_Nevill]

Hi Ray,

Thanks for the link.

My screen saver is set to kick in after 30mins of idle, likewise the power save is set for and hour. so they are only active when I leave the machine for short periods, as I prefer not to power it down or hibernate, even so, the same bug persists.

The gist of the bug is that upon wake up (from any of the above), the gamma tables are reset rather than re-initialised.

My lad has just bought an iMac for video stuff he's doing at college, perhaps I should gone that way. Although cross grades on most of my apps makes it prohibitively expensive.

[Ray West]

Hi John,

I'm not recommending a Mac. I only posted that link, because I was not aware there was a problem with lcd screen persistence, and that was more or less the first that came up. Personally, I do not use screen savers, or power saving modes, just leave it all on 24/7. (but I'm on xp, and only one monitor, so I don't get the gamma table problems anyway, I guess)

I'm not too sure of the difference between the reset and reinitialise, but if it's a question of using the wrong table, can you not just rename them, or is the 'reset' just setting it back to some rom based default or similar?

Best wishes,

Ray

[John_Nevill]

Hi Ray, the "consider a mac" option, has been an inner personal batte for a couple for years now, so I won't hold you responsible :o)

Back to Vista, Its only the 2nd monitor that loses the LUT table. Here's (http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/windows-vistas-gamma-table-bug/) more details on it.

[Rachel Foster]

Vista has given me more grief than any other software I've ever tried. Granted it could be partly because the hardware and software programs I'm trying to apply are not updated to be Vista compatible. But Vista....