My laptop screen keeps going off! Solutions?

**oneala** · May 11th, 2021

Update.. This seems to only be happening when I am on Ubuntu, when i boot into Windows, this does not happen. I am uncertain how to diagnose this..

**oneala** · May 11th, 2021

Oh and I also cleared out dust, and checked connections.. No change

**oneala** · May 12th, 2021

So I have dusted and cleaned up the contact points and even the fan, but still when I log-in to Ubuntu, my screen again shuts down. On the other habd when I boot into Windows, this doesn't happen (In all the time I was using Win, it only went off once for some update, as compared to 6+ times on Ubuntu).

**Frogs Hair** · May 12th, 2021

If it is overheating I suspect there was some sort of problem with the Ubuntu installation. If you run the following command in the terminal it should display what process may be causing the problem. Post output here via copy&paste

Code:

top

**amanchesterman** · May 13th, 2021

I don't want to complicate matters but I had the same problem (without the overheating) on my laptop. I've tracked it down to DPMS, which apparently stands for 'display power management signalling' and is often built into hardware.

I run Xubuntu and there are settings to disable the screensaver, not blank the screen etc. -- but on my machine these are ignored and the screen goes blank after a few minutes, whether it's running on battery or mains power. But the XFCE power manager has an option to enable 'presentation mode', and when that is selected DPMS is disabled and the screen stays on.

I don't know if your DE has a similar option? It might be worth exploring anyway, besides tackling the overheating of course.

**oneala** · May 14th, 2021

Thanks for sharing your experience @amanchesterman, but i have Ubuntu 20.04 which runs on Gnome and I am currently unable to find much about DPMS, though I will keep trying. Also!! The same thing has also happened just now on my system when I tried to boot it from Windows 10! it shut off, and when I powered it back on I got the message :"Unexpected Kernal mode trap".
So I am kind of concerned that it is something related to the hardware bit :/

**oneala** · May 14th, 2021

@FrogsHair, below is the result of top:

Code:

top - 16:22:40 up 1 min,  1 user,  load average: 2.10, 1.01, 0.39
Tasks: 304 total,   1 running, 303 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 13.0 us,  1.2 sy,  0.0 ni, 85.2 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.6 si,  0.0 st
MiB Mem :   7832.3 total,   4760.9 free,   1403.1 used,   1668.3 buff/cache
MiB Swap:   2048.0 total,   2048.0 free,      0.0 used.   6142.1 avail Mem 

    PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                                                                                                              
   2082 ro        20   0 1256876 225688  41988 S  77.1   2.8   0:08.72 snap-store                                                                                                                           
   1616 ro        20   0 1459892  93952  62748 S   4.7   1.2   0:04.45 Xorg                                                                                                                                 
   1807 ro        20   0 5294268 294220 121708 S   4.0   3.7   0:09.58 gnome-shell                                                                                                                          
   2752 ro        20   0 2200844 113004  77736 S   3.0   1.4   0:07.80 skypeforlinux                                                                                                                        
   2887 ro        20   0 6192916 159492 110180 S   2.7   2.0   0:10.02 skypeforlinux                                                                                                                        
top - 16:22:44 up 1 min,  1 user,  load average: 2.10, 1.01, 0.39
Tasks: 304 total,   2 running, 302 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  2.7 us,  1.1 sy,  0.0 ni, 96.0 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.2 si,  0.0 st
MiB Mem :   7832.3 total,   4753.3 free,   1408.9 used,   1670.1 buff/cache
MiB Swap:   2048.0 total,   2048.0 free,      0.0 used.   6136.3 avail Mem

**MAFoElffen** · February 26th, 2022

I can confirm that the defualt seetings have DPMS on by default...

Code:

xset s off -dpms

That will disable DPMS and turn off screen blanking. If it is using an zorg.conf file, like the ones in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/, there are two sections (Monitor, Extensions) where you can disable or turn off DPMS.