Screen does not stay dark

[charlesrich]

@lring

One of the pilot users (Aaron Seidman) reported the following:

"The screen did stay lit most of the time, including after 10 pm and before 6 am; it was easy to see that from several rooms away because it was so bright. The facial recognition seemed to work well, recognizing profiles as well as frontal views. (On a number of occasions, when I entered the room and walked past the computer without actually looking at it, it said hello to me.) In short, display of the image was consistent with your description, but darkening of the screen was not."

I will try to reproduce this problem at our house, but could you please explicitly check with other pilot users regarding whether the screen stayed lighted all night?

Tx, -CR

[charlesrich]

Is it possible that the Hangout-related code that simulates mouse clicks runs more often than just on client startup? This would cancel the screen saver. Where is the code that simulates a mouse click---let's put some tracking on it. -CR

I looked at the C# code and it appears that the mouse click is only generated once at startup, so this is probably no caused the screensaver problem, though it still causes #445.

[charlesrich]

I have definitely been able to reproduce Aaron's problem on our machine at home (at least with Reeti connected---which may be a complicating factor). Since this behavior only has to do with Windows (we are just using the builtin screensaver mechanisms here), I did some searching.

It appears, according to some sources, that the wake-up feature also interacts with the screen saver. Please note I have added a new step 5(i) in docs/setup-asus.txt to turn off all wake-up features related to the network and USB (except for KB and mouse, which will not be connected). This is a good idea anyways, and I am going to see if this fixes the problem.

Btw, there is a DOS command to check what the last system wake-up event was:

powercfg /lastwake

which might help us debug this problem.

[charlesrich]

Ok, I have found the smoking gun and it is the googletalkplugin process. Here's how you can confirm the problem (and then hopefully the solution):

• temporarily change the screensaver timeout to 1 minute (from 10)
• unplug the motion detector
• put a piece of tape over the camera
• start the system
• move the mouse so the screen becomes visible: only Hello should show (no agent)
• wait two minutes, being careful not to touch mouse or KB
• notice that the screensaver does NOT invoke (screen stays visible).
• Now, using Task Manager, right-click on googletalkplugin and select "End Process Tree"
• wait one minute (without touching mouse or KB)---screensaver will turn screen black
• don't forget to set the screensaver timeout back to 10

I went through this cycle twice just to make sure. I then Google'd for "googletalkplugin screensaver" and found this is known problem:

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1659570/screensaver-activate.html

However, the solution link didn't work. I hope you can figure this out.

Tx, -Chuck

[charlesrich]

P.S. I did a small experiment and (you may already know this), the plugin does not appear to need to be running until a call is actually in progress. If I have IE running and am logged into the alwaysontesting@gmail.com, then I receive notification of an attempt to connect even if the plugin is not running. It then asks to download the plugin in order to finish setting up the call.

So if there is a way to only have the plugin running when a call is going on, that would solve the problem.

-CR