Odd screensaver behaviour

No response so far from the Windows community - maybe uk.d-i-y can help?

-------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: Odd screensaver behaviour Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2021 23:12:05 +0000 From: Roger Mills snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com Organization: Association of Revolting Peasants Newsgroups: alt.comp.os.windows-10

I've just set up a new W10 desktop machine with two monitors - the main one landscape for general use and the second one portrait for displaying A4 sized documents in actual size. For obvious reasons, the monitors are configured as "Extended these displays" rather than "Duplicate these displays".

I've set up a screensaver in the form of a photo slide show. When the portrait monitor is on the right and the screensaver cuts in, its screen goes blank and the slideshow takes place on the main (landscape) monitor

- which is fine.

However, when the portrait monitor is on the left and the screensaver cuts in, the photos are half on each monitor with black space outboard of them.

Anyone come across this, and any suggestions for fixing it? [OK I could put the portrait monitor on the right but I really *want* it on the left].

Surely this is because the screens are shared and the screensaver happens to be over one side more than the other? Brian

What for?

Bill

Well I would imagine its down to the screen saver and how its designed. If it has no ability to do anything but a default to, say the left if there is a strange other monitor, that is what it will do. When you swap them you force it to compromise since its not used to that opposite config. When you say screensaver, is this the built in windows one or some third party one? I doubt you are going to get much since here really. after all there are not many L shaped slides about in the first place with thehigher bit on the left. Back when I could see we tried to do what you mention, and believe me it was no mean task on crt monitors either, and the screensaver always went to the landscape, blacking out the other one, so I'm surprised it is actually attempting to use both in any case. Brian

Yes I never really saw the need for it just black the screen out surely?

Does anyone remember the one with the island that went through days nd nights with the little castaway who did various things and ships would come by and he would always miss them etc? Brian

You can rotate the monitors, or, the monitor has hardware support for orientation (a "ball bearing orientation switch" in the panel, changes state when you rotate the display to Portrait and the EDID declaration does something appropriate to signal the change to the OS).

The best panel for setup, is likely to be the AMD or NVidia control panel, because modes are available which Windows doesn't particularly support. For example, Eyefinity takes three monitors of equal dimension (1920x1080) and makes a 5760x1080 surface from it. And if you play a computer game, the game makes textures as if playing on a 5760x1080 monitor. Games don't support arbitrary texture size, so not all games are willing to go that far.

Eyefinity and NVidia Surround, go to six monitors and two display channels (all coming off a *single* video card). Way back when, the notion of display channels was introduced to video cards, and there were two display channels. Sometimes, you'd see two entries in Device Manager because of it. If a display channel failed (sometimes a driver only installed half the video card) then when playing a game or using OpenGL or something, you'd have an acceleration failure related to the channels. If it wasn't for mis-behaving, we'd never even know those logical things were present. Alt-tabbing out of a game, may use the second logical display channel. There are many possibilities.

+-----------+-----------+-----------+ | | | | logical display channel1 | | | | 5760x1080 +-----------+-----------+-----------+ +-----------+-----------+-----------+ | | | | logical display channel2 | | | | 5760x1080 +-----------+-----------+-----------+

That's an example of what you can get out of one, high end video card (maybe a Titan), and the representation there might only be known to NVidia or AMD, and Windows might think there are two monitors like this. This is how my high-end config looks in the Windows panel for it. After the AMD panel set it up.

+------------------------------------+ | +-----------+ | | | 1 | | | +-----------+ | | +-----------+ | | | 2 | | | +-----------+ | +------------------------------------+

The tables on the NVidia site, also referred to four monitor configs, with one monitor being an "orphan of sorts". Like this. That's how a previous generation handled video card faceplates with a lot of connectors.

+-----------+-----------+-----------+ | | | | | 1 | 2 | 3 | +-----------+-----------+-----------+ +-----------+ | | | 4 | +-----------+

There is really "endless dribble" on this topic and what happens at the crossbar, inside the video card.

Windows also supports two video cards (without SLI) and four monitors. When I tested that, in *mid session*, the two cards swapped identities and the screen f***ed up. It was... pretty funny at the time. What do you do then ? Will the monitors arbitrarily flip back tomorrow ? I took the setup apart.

There are also third-party softwares for this. I always get a kick out of the customer pictures here. The hardware profile is listed below the picture. Since Windows 10 has had some of the snot kicked out of it, I don't know if you can do these any more or not.

Now, if I were the developer at Microsoft, I'd get the screensaver working on one monitor, then just... go for a beer. End of story. Who wants to spend the extra ten minutes making it work on everything ? Like, imagine the Realtimesoft sample setup, with a 2560x1600 spread over that many monitors.

This should really be a doddle to do, because the "background" of the desktop, is a rectangular area spanning all the monitors. You could spew a picture from your folder, over that rectangular area and this job would be done. It really should not be hard to do, and the property (dimensions of virtual area) are known to SnippingTool, as an example. If you use SnippingTool, and ask it to capture the entire desktop, it will capture a rectangle as big as "all the monitor areas defined and then some".

+------------+---------+ With my two monitors, | 1440x900 |1280x1024| snippingtool captures | green | | a 2720x1024 rectangle. +------------+ | | green | green | The lower-left area is +------------+---------+ "not representable".

Paul

It's on my wife's new computer. When she is in the same room but not using the computer she likes to see a random selection of her photographic masterpieces on the screen.

oh, how does it attempt to send video without hsync or vsync?

PAss. All I know is the monitor seems to power off completely and sometimes it would wakeup showing "resolution searching" in the top right hand corner with the selected resolution but more often than not it wouldn't, requiring a physical power cycle. I'm not sure if the monitor was off or in some sort of sleep state. It's a 13 YO Hazro 1920*1200 monitor.

It's not an issue I have just reverted to a screen saver and it's a desktop so I am not concerned about saving power.

Andrew