I upgraded my long-standing Windows Vista desktop to Windows 7 over the last weekend, and now I notice my three monitors do not turn off after the stipulated 15 minutes as specified in the Power options. The screens go black like a blank screen saver (even when no screen saver is defined), but it is obvious from the monitors' power buttons they are not put into standby like in the Vista days; remaining blue instead of orange, and the mouse cursor is still around.
The ATI catalyst drivers for my Powercolor Radeon HD5770 PCS+ card (attaching one DisplayPort, two DVI) have been updated but yield no change in behaviour. Any ideas what else I can check to investigate this?
UPDATE 20 Apr
Seems like last night it could standby the displays. I need to further observe this to see if I can figure about a pattern.
UPDATE 21 Apr
It appears that, when i connect to the desktop computer with Remote Desktop, the physical monitors get switched on. They won't get dismissed until i log on to the physical session. So now lies the question of how not to get the monitors to react to a Remote desktop connection.
UPDATE 4 Jul
"Interesting". today i see the main (DisplayPort) monitor going into standby, while the two side monitors remain on. i am totally baffled by Windows 7's behaviour when it comes to deciding which monitor to power down.
Best Answer
Windows tells every monitor connected to wake up when you start using it, either buy moving the mouse or connecting remotely. Why don't you just turn off the monitors that you don't want to be woken up. If they are still plugged in, windows will still generate the images for them, so if you have an extended desktop, you can still drag programs onto screens you cannot actually see.
You could also try and create a batch file that, when run, changes your screen resolution settings to display only the primary monitor. This would mean you remotely connect in, the monitors turn on, you run the script, the secondary monitors get set to unused and they go back to standby. How you would write this script I do not know.