Power settings. That fun thing that lives in the control panel and you can access from the screen saver settings.

My laptop is set to always on. No, not that preset. ALWAYS ON. As in, every single drop down box is checked to "never". Until recently, this has been peachy.

It obviously is no longer peachy since I'm posting about it.

Those settings are now resetting themselves seemingly at random to the stock defaults. And I'm not just talking those little drop down boxes, I'm talking every single tab and option for power settings. In fact, I just pulled it up so I could rattle some options off, and it's reset again. We're talking Turn off monitor/hard disks, System standby/hibernate, Low Battery Alarm settings, everything on the Advanced tab.

This is ****ing annoying. I have my laptop setup to go into hibernation when I hit the sleep button. If this resets without my knowledge, well... lets just say I really don't want to pack up a computer that's still on to some extent and arrive with a dead battery.

I'm clueless as to why it's suddenly decided to do this, and it all seems to have started after I installed the latest ATI Catalyst drivers for my admittedly craptacular onboard chip and uninstalled all the SETI at home stuff since I was never letting it run anyway.

Ideas? I'm not keen on doing a reformat or system reinstall to fix this after only having it literally 4 months.

bumpage

What version of Windows?

XP SP2. Up to date as of 3ish or so months ago.

BIOS error?
Im really just throughing that in. What the hell do i know?

One very well might ask. You can't even really take care of your OWN computer. Please don't try and troubleshoot mine.

This really is completely random. I just tossed it into hibernation with the sleep key not but five minutes ago, remembered I needed something yet, powered back up, got it, hit the sleep key... and it went to sleep and not hibernation.

I'll try and suffer through trying to find an answer or helpful tidbit in Microsoft's support documents tomorrow I guess. I'm not seeing how the Catalyst drivers could do this. Nor uninstalling the SETI@home stuff. Unless something snuck on, but offhand I'm not seeing anything out of the ordinary in the task manager.

Hey hey now. I might not know fancy harware crap. But i can keep my comp up just fine. Just last week i had to swap out 3 HDDs [Lighting= bad] and then a floppy drive broke. then the wires mixed so i had to sort that out. then i had to format.then my other comp lost vista so i had install xp and find mother board drivers with the other computer put em on disk and use them on this one.

I can take care just fine. Just ain't exactly professional.

You don't know what you're talking about or what you are doing.

Please don't continue use techie jargon, make up stories on internet, or try to fool us into thinking you aren't as dumb as we know you are.

i've had issues with catlyst drivers resetting power settings too. it usually happens when i watch a lot of movies though(on my desktop, which i have hooked up to my TV.) i have my monitor set to turn off after 5 mins idle, but at random it resets to never.

you could try the thrid party Omega Drivers for it, they work wonders for some people. i had issues with it, but there are people who swear by them.

also, in the latest catlyst drivers, in the task manager instead of the three CLI.exe they used to have they have MOM.exe which is also teh name of a known keylogger, but reports from ATI say they didnt know that when they named it that.

And people wonder why I won't use ATI. :/

its not like the drivers cause massive system failure and data loss. christ man, its just slightly irksome. and nVidia's interface for settings really blows.

I don't have any problems with it.

I HATE irksome things as much as I HATE ****ty drivers.

Rob, I'll tell you what I told the short idiot.

Piss off if you aren't going to be helpful.

Ford, I have an old driver that I can roll back to easily enough. It'll at least let me see if the Catalyst stuff is the problem. From what I can tell, the new Catalyst drivers didn't help my crappy onboard chipset anyway, so I won't be missing much. Also, have a link handy for those Omega Drivers?

Knew about the MOM.exe thing. I have a habit of googling any process I don't recognize or that looks out of the ordinary.

Oh I forgot! We can't have discussions in threads you post! I'm sorry, oh master of all the forums.

I'm happy you understand. I didn't ask for a debate of the merits of ATI over nVidia or vice versa. I asked if anyone had any ideas why this started happening.