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[Haschel]

I've been having some peculiar problems with my PC and I'm quite frankly at a loss of where to start looking for solutions. It started initially with my monitor, it was around 5-6 years old and it kept wigging out whenever I'd take it out of sleep mode by moving the mouse. It'd come back out of sleep mode and immediately go back into it. Struggled with that for a little while and the issue grew worse and it eventually stopped working altogether. I chalked it up to the thing's age and borrowed someone else's monitor until I got a replacement (I'd been wanting to upgrade for ages anyway).

Then I noticed with the borrowed monitor new, similar problems would persist and actually would be worse in some ways; after taking it out of sleep mode I would notice Steam (Which I generally just leave open most of the time) would have crashed by the time it came out of sleep mode depending on how long I'd left it. Sometimes if it was just a minute or two the system would just be horribly lagged as if the hardware were running full force and I'd have to shut the computer down. Obviously at this point I realized it was something wrong with the computer itself which may have broken the previous monitor, or possibly have just exacerbated an existing problem. Now here's where I'm really in a bit of a bind, I want to fix whatever is going on here before it causes any more damage to my hardware but I haven't a clue what could be wrong in the first place. I've run some extensive virus and malware scans and come up with nothing- I'm not sure if I'm ready to rule that out as the issue but it's not coming up with any answers for me. I also thought it might be steam itself as that's the only thing I've noticed issues with. I'm trying to remember closing it and leaving the PC idle when I get a chance to see if there's any noticeable effects, but I haven't had a chance to do that quite yet. I've also re-installed Steam itself and that didn't appear to help.

I fooled around with my power saving options in the control panel but nothing really seems to be helping and I never touched them prior to the issues anyway, so that seems like a dead end. I've been updating windows and my graphics drivers etc hoping that might do it, but again I haven't seen results yet. With all that done I'm kind of running out of places to look for solutions, hence the thread. Any ideas? I'm running Windows 7 64bit, I've got an ATI Radeon HD 5870, I can post more specs if there's anything else that might be important.

[Thief^]

Do you mean the pc is going to sleep, or it's just turning the monitor off? The difference is that a sleeping pc is normally a lot quieter and normally flashes its power light. A pc with the monitor off is just as noisy as normal and still has the power light on, and may still flicker the hard-disk light occasionally. If the pc is actually sleeping, check your bios for any settings relating to sleep/suspend. You want mode 3 sleep/suspend if possible, and there might be a setting for re-running the graphics card's bios/init when coming out of sleep, you can see if that helps.

When the system is lagged, open task manager (ctrl+shift+escape) and see which process is using the most cpu time (ignoring the "system idle process", obviously). Also check that you're not using close to all of your physical memory. If you are, you're probably experiencing the effect of swapping ram to the page file, and you need to either kill things using a lot of ram, of get more ram installed. If that doesn't identify an obvious culprit, open the resource monitor from the performance page of the task manager, and look for processes doing a large amount of disk reads/writes. Again this can cause serious performance problems, and you should look into whether you really need the offending process.

[Haschel]

Thanks for that, was in too much of a slump to think of the standard task manager solution. Turned out to be atieclxx.exe also known as AMD External Events Utility. Turned off the service and it's been smooth sailing.

[optimumtact]

Sounds like unstable driver software then, I guess you can leave it as it is but you may want to vist the AMD site and download the latest video drivers for your card.