NAV idle activity and screensaver cancel each other out

1. It seems that NAV's idle activity doesn't start until after my screensaver starts. (If i set my screensaver delay time to seven or ten minutes, the NAV idle activity pop-up pops up 18 seconds later. If i set the delay time to one minute, the NAV pop-up pops up a minute or so after the screensaver comes on. If i set the delay time to four minutes, NAV still waits till after the screensaver starts before starting.)

 

2. When the NAV pop-up pops up, it disengages the screensaver.

 

3. When the screensaver disengages, it causes the pop-up to immediately go away, presumably also stopping the idle activity. (The screensaver delay time begins again, the screensaver starts after the delay time ends, and the NAV pop-up pops up again after the same amount of time that it did the previous time.)

 

4. It appears that neither NAV's idle activity nor the screensaver get to accomplish their tasks. This is not desired behavior. *tears hair out*

 

5. Is there any way to tell NAV to continue the idle activity after the screensaver turns off?


shinai wrote:

1. It seems that NAV's idle activity doesn't start until after my screensaver starts. (If i set my screensaver delay time to seven or ten minutes, the NAV idle activity pop-up pops up 18 seconds later. If i set the delay time to one minute, the NAV pop-up pops up a minute or so after the screensaver comes on. If i set the delay time to four minutes, NAV still waits till after the screensaver starts before starting.)

 

2. When the NAV pop-up pops up, it disengages the screensaver.

 

3. When the screensaver disengages, it causes the pop-up to immediately go away, presumably also stopping the idle activity. (The screensaver delay time begins again, the screensaver starts after the delay time ends, and the NAV pop-up pops up again after the same amount of time that it did the previous time.)

 

4. It appears that neither NAV's idle activity nor the screensaver get to accomplish their tasks. This is not desired behavior. *tears hair out*

 

5. Is there any way to tell NAV to continue the idle activity after the screensaver turns off?


 

Hi, shinai.  What is happening in your situation, is the idle activity NAV is performing is triggering the Video Drivers to think there is system activity going on - at a level where the screen saver should be lowered - and thus the screen reverts to visibility.  The cycle repeats as you describe.

 

To break the cycle, what is required is for the Video drivers not to detect background activity that has no keyboard input - as activity that should bring the system out of screensaver mode.  This kind of problem is usually fixed by Video Driver updates.  Check to see if there are Video Driver updates available for your particular Video Card make and model.

 

 

Caveats, wrinkles and "gotchas":

 

Intel has just released new Video Drivers for the IGP onboard video on Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge CPUs.  If your system runs in Hybrid mode (you run the Intel drivers when the system is idle and only switch to dedicated Video Card drivers when the system demands high-performance video), then you have two Video Driver sets to update, not just one.

 

Also, there is a piece of software called Optimus (for Nvidia) or Enduro (for ATI) that controls the automatic switching between the IGP and the high-performance Video Card modes.  Bugs in this "interface layer" could cause problems where the system "pops" out of IGP mode (which is where it should be during idle) because the interface-layer "sees" the idle-mode-activity from NIS/NAV as something which demands the high-performance video drivers become active.  Again, a cycle starts and repeats in error from this false-trigger.

 

As far as I am aware, the only solution for the above problem is to keep all the Video Drivers on your system up-to-date - or to revert to earlier Video Driver versions that do not false-trigger on idle activities that should properly be ignored.  However, using older Video Driver versions means you have to deal with other bugs in those older video drivers that are not being addressed - other than by updating - and thereby using solutions that incur the potential stability and interoperability/incompatibility problems that come with the latest video drivers that incorporate Optimus/Enduro.

 

Furthermore, since this whole Optimus/Enduro thing - along with the interaction with the Intel IGP drivers - is all bleeding-edge technology right now - I somehow suspect that having glitches that the Video Driver companies haven't got properly sorted out is going to be common - until ATI/Nvidia/Intel work out some sort of "we need to cross-cooperate on this stuff" procedure - so the three players are not working to cross purposes and/or stomping on each other's toes.

 

 

Other things to be aware of:

 

Until the above situation settles down, NIS/NAV gets to be a victim of political machinations between the three abovementioned players - as each try to screw up the others' lives to "gain competitive advantage" - which is marketspeak drivel for "we will throw monkeywrenches into each others' product, and we don't care how much it screws up users' lives".

 

Welcome to computers in 2013.  Furthermore, I suspect Symantec (and all the rest of the anti-malware developers) are tearing their hair out behind-the-scenes as they try and cope with the consequences of working with "beta" software that ATI/Nvidia/Intel are foisting on the marketplace as "release quality".  Symantec (and everybody else) is frantically trying to keep their products working properly as the marketplace thrashes through instability after instability around them - and nobody is calling the release of half-baked Video Driver software the nonsense that it is.

 

 

No, it ain't pretty.  :smileymad:

 

 

Sound stupid and too simple on my part, but are you saying this causes Nortin to not do the idle time scans?


Calls wrote:
Sound stupid and too simple on my part, but are you saying this causes Nortin to not do the idle time scans?

Hi, Calls.  Everything depends on how the bugs actually manifest themselves.

 

If the OS power-management intermittently fails to emit a power-management-event notifying Windows the system is back in use - then NIS/NAV will blithely continue thinking the system is idle when it is not - and scans will occur during foreground activity until such time as power-management reality is again reliably reflected in the OS..

 

If the OS power-management intermittently fails to emit a power-management-event notifying Windows the system has gone idle - then NIS/NAV will not do idle time scans until such time as NIS gets desperate enough to override its own prohibition against doing scans while the user is active.   And again, things will remain this way until such time as the power-management reality is again  reliably reflected in the OS.

 

What matters is whether or not the power-management events reliably mirror what the machine is actually doing - along with the true power state of all subsystems under active power management.

 

If power-management reality is one thing and the OS thinks it's another - "bad things happen".  :smileysad:

 

 

Hope this helps your understanding.

 

It appears to be working as desired now. The screensaver stays on for long periods without NAV idle activity turning it off. I believe what fixed it was that i turned the screensaver off, turned the monitor off and left the system idle overnight so NAV could do its thing. If the issue returns i'll post as Dick Evans suggested. I'll also check my video drivers. Thanks.

I updated my video drivers. Afterward, once NAV had some more idle activity to accomplish, the situation resumed. NAV idle activity and the screensaver keep canceling each other out. I've posted the original post in the Product Suggestions forum, as dickevans suggested.


shinai wrote:

I updated my video drivers. Afterward, once NAV had some more idle activity to accomplish, the situation resumed. NAV idle activity and the screensaver keep canceling each other out. I've posted the original post in the Product Suggestions forum, as dickevans suggested.


Hi, shinai.  Something just occurred to me - are you running a third-party screen saver?  Or is this the screen saver embedded in Windows itself?  If third-party, then that may be the problem and you will need to contact them for a program update.

 

Note: You may be able to test this by reverting your system to "no screen saver" mode - by temporarily disabling the screen saver to see what happens.  If the problem goes away, then you definitely know the screen saver is interpreting a power-management-event improperly - which is the cause of the problem.

 

 

Hope this helps.

 

I'm using native Windows screen savers. This issue is happening on my laptop as well as my desktop (different screen savers - one blank and one photos).

 

I've solved the issue by uninstalling NAV. Thanks for your help.

1. It seems that NAV's idle activity doesn't start until after my screensaver starts. (If i set my screensaver delay time to seven or ten minutes, the NAV idle activity pop-up pops up 18 seconds later. If i set the delay time to one minute, the NAV pop-up pops up a minute or so after the screensaver comes on. If i set the delay time to four minutes, NAV still waits till after the screensaver starts before starting.)

 

2. When the NAV pop-up pops up, it disengages the screensaver.

 

3. When the screensaver disengages, it causes the pop-up to immediately go away, presumably also stopping the idle activity. (The screensaver delay time begins again, the screensaver starts after the delay time ends, and the NAV pop-up pops up again after the same amount of time that it did the previous time.)

 

4. It appears that neither NAV's idle activity nor the screensaver get to accomplish their tasks. This is not desired behavior. *tears hair out*

 

5. Is there any way to tell NAV to continue the idle activity after the screensaver turns off?

As one responder said, uninstalling Norton is one solution, but this may be more rewarding:

 

I recently "automatically" updated to 360.  I am using Windows 7.  I had the same problem: the Windows native screensaver was being interrupted by Norton idle tasks, and when the screensaver shut off, the idle tasks then aborted.

 

I went to Norton's Settings >  Administrative Settings and TURNED OFF "Norton Task Notification"

 

This ended my problem.

 

This situation is happening on both my laptop and desktop. I'm also not able to get Ghost to work on these computers (VSS Provider Install error - and yes, i've tried lots of fixes). One dev stated in passing that he thought he'd seen many of the VSS errors on systems that had upgraded Vista to Win7 without doing a clean install. Perhaps that's the same issue here. Regardless, having functional software that plays nice with my systems is the objective. I used to swear by Norton products. Now i'm swearing off them.

 

I've resolved the issue by uninstalling NAV and installing a different company's AV software.

1. It seems that NAV's idle activity doesn't start until after my screensaver starts. (If i set my screensaver delay time to seven or ten minutes, the NAV idle activity pop-up pops up 18 seconds later. If i set the delay time to one minute, the NAV pop-up pops up a minute or so after the screensaver comes on. If i set the delay time to four minutes, NAV still waits till after the screensaver starts before starting.)

 

2. When the NAV pop-up pops up, it disengages the screensaver.

 

3. When the screensaver disengages, it causes the pop-up to immediately go away, presumably also stopping the idle activity. (The screensaver delay time begins again, the screensaver starts after the delay time ends, and the NAV pop-up pops up again after the same amount of time that it did the previous time.)

 

4. It appears that neither NAV's idle activity nor the screensaver get to accomplish their tasks. This is not desired behavior.

 

5. Is there any way to tell NAV to continue the idle activity after the screensaver turns off? Or, even better, to tell NAV not to disengage the screensaver?

 

6. I previously posted this in the NIS/NAV forum and was told by dickevans to post it here.

 

7. Each time i try to post this post to this forum i get html errors that i can't figure out where they are or how to fix them, so if this message doesn't work, i don't know what to do.

 

8. The link above for some reason doesn't take me to my original post in the thread, but to the second response. I have no idea what i'm doing wrong or how to fix it. I hope this isn't a problem. Just be sure to scroll to the top, although it's the same as the above content #1-5, so not a big deal. Sorry i'm having so much trouble with the simple things.

Sorry you had to take that route to resolve your problem. Be sure to run the Norton Removal Tool

www.Norton.com/nrt

to be sure that all of the program is eliminated so that it does not cause a conflict with your new security product.

Stay well and surf safe

Sorry for the rant and thanks for your help and reminder.