Windows 10 monitor timeout settings/control

Windows 10... man, it happens all the time. You go to turn it on and it starts prepping updates, or you try to shut it down and it’s busy applying them. But since the screen is just black, you have no clue what's actually happening. So, naturally, you think it's stuck, hit that power button a few times to force a restart, and—surprise, surprise—you end up bricking the whole thing.

Is there some setting buried somewhere that guarantees Windows 10 will, I don't know, light up the monitor first? Like, show something logical on the screen before it decides to go dark during a shutdown?

Just so the user knows Windows 10 Mobile isn't totally frozen and is actually doing its job.

Michelle Bennett5 said:Windows 10... man, it happens all the time. You go to turn it on and it starts prepping updates, or you try to shut it down and it’s busy applying them. But since the screen is just black, you have no clue what's actually happening. So, naturally, you think it's stuck, hit that power button a few times to force a restart, and—surprise, surprise—you end up bricking the whole thing.

Is there some setting buried somewhere that guarantees Windows 10 will, I don't know, light up the monitor first? Like, show something logical on the screen before it decides to go dark during a shutdown?

Just so the user knows Windows 10 Mobile isn't totally frozen and is actually doing its job.

When you boot up a standard PC, you see the motherboard logo and everything else first, right?
You must have tweaked something in your Windows settings or the BIOS. Honestly, the simplest fix is to just reset your BIOS to factory defaults or go ahead and reinstall Windows.

ruggedpanther2 said:When you boot up a standard PC, you see the motherboard logo and everything else first, right?
You must have tweaked something in your Windows settings or the BIOS. Honestly, the simplest fix is to just reset your BIOS to factory defaults or go ahead and reinstall Windows.

nope
The computer is factory fresh, a clean install of Windows 10

And yeah, obviously, you see the motherboard logo first
But then Windows starts loading, the screen goes black, and you're stuck waiting forever before the Windows login screen finally pops up
While the screen is dark, you can tell the hard drive is absolutely slamming away—it can take several minutes like this
Even when you go to shut down the PC, the screen turns off, but you can still see the drive light flickering away for a while longer

It doesn't happen on every machine, but it definitely happens
I've seen people who don't realize the computer is actually busy doing something, so they just force it off or restart it, and that's usually when they actually break things
Honestly, life would be so much easier if Windows was designed to always keep an image on the monitor until the disk activity actually stops

...the monitor doesn't actually kick in right at startup. You're just staring at a black screen until those GPU drivers finally load up, and since they aren't prioritized over the core system files, there's a bit of a lag.
That’s basically why we have the power and hard drive LEDs—so you can at least tell the machine is actually doing something while you wait.

wearymason4 said:...the monitor doesn't actually kick in right at startup. You're just staring at a black screen until those GPU drivers finally load up, and since they aren't prioritized over the core system files, there's a bit of a lag.
That’s basically why we have the power and hard drive LEDs—so you can at least tell the machine is actually doing something while you wait.

So, to put it another way... why can't the system just initialize the graphics card with a basic preliminary driver right at the start, instead of waiting for the whole OS to fully boot before loading the actual video driver? And then just reverse the process when shutting down?
I honestly think it would make the user experience a lot less frustrating.

It's pretty obvious, though—it would just drag out the boot times and make shutting down the PC a total pain.

Back in the day, operating systems would actually scan every single piece of hardware during bootup just to see what was installed, which meant waiting forever…

Then they finally had the bright idea to just save that configuration after the first scan. Now, they just use that saved profile every time you turn the computer on, assuming you haven't gone out and swapped your motherboard or something

Which, honestly, was a pretty smart move. I mean, how often does someone actually swap out their motherboard or plug in a new graphics card or some random PCI card? It’s incredibly rare. There’s really no reason to waste time scanning everything every single time. Of course, the OS still needs to be smart enough to realize if the hardware doesn't match the old config so it can trigger a new scan without making things a total mess

What I'm getting at is that there is massive room for optimization during the boot process. Like, seriously, spending a millisecond to initialize a basic video driver isn't going to break the bank or anything

Michelle Bennett5 said:Back in the day, operating systems would actually scan every single piece of hardware during bootup just to see what was installed, which meant waiting forever…

Then they finally had the bright idea to just save that configuration after the first scan. Now, they just use that saved profile every time you turn the computer on, assuming you haven't gone out and swapped your motherboard or something

Which, honestly, was a pretty smart move. I mean, how often does someone actually swap out their motherboard or plug in a new graphics card or some random PCI card? It’s incredibly rare. There’s really no reason to waste time scanning everything every single time. Of course, the OS still needs to be smart enough to realize if the hardware doesn't match the old config so it can trigger a new scan without making things a total mess

What I'm getting at is that there is massive room for optimization during the boot process. Like, seriously, spending a millisecond to initialize a basic video driver isn't going to break the bank or anything

There was a lot of chaos before we had modern software and Windows 10.

But I honestly don't get how there's absolutely *nothing* on the screen?

First, the PC should show the BIOS info and the menu, then even Windows 10 usually shows little boxes and a spinning loading icon while the OS boots up. Is this happening on multiple machines or just one?