XL201 Standby / Black Screen

[IronChicken]

I purchased an XL201 media pc in November 2006 and in the main it has worked well. However I have experienced problems when waking the machine from standby as follows:-

I select the HDMI input on the TV
Then hit standby on the remote
The XL201 starts to "wake", the lights flicker on front panel and the amber led turns green suggesting it has now woken up.. but the tv screen remains black.
I find that I can send the PC back in and out of standbye using the remote or keyboard but this usually doesnt help (see variations below).
Finally I resort to holding the front panel button in for a few seconds to force a complete shutdown.
When I then restart the machine its OK.

Here are some variants and other bits of info that may help a diagnosis..

Sometimes (rarely), sending m/c back to standbye and then back out gets it to work.

Sometimes, if I hit the "windows" key on the keyboard, the start menu and task bar appear (although everything else is black), clicking on he Media Center icon in the task bar returns to full black screen, however if I run Task Manager and kill Media Center this restores my desktop and I can restart Media Center - al then appears well.

Sometimes the Status LED is flashing amber - not sure what this means - couldnt find it in user manual... maybe saying its not gone in to standbye because of scheduled recording or something.

Appears to show this behavour if its trying to record a program at the time, on a couple of occasions I have ended up shutting the system down to clear the black screen problem, only realising afterwards that it was trying to do a recording which is now aborted. But most of the time its not recording when the problem occurs.

I would be grateful for any advice, help etc

Thx

[scoobyuser]

Having the same fault myself connected to a KDL40x2000 via HDMI

I have Vaio Support on the case at the moment, will post the outcome when they get back to me

As u i have to force a complete shutdown which is not a ideal way to
shut down a computer

Also another fault i have is if im playing music through media centre and change
the source on my TV ie AV1 to watch SKY the music jumps??

Do u experience this ?

I have been told i have to live with basically from Vaio support
which im not to happy with espeicially with the coming out of standby fault

Apart from that great machine but may be tempted for a refund

[IronChicken]

Hi scoobyuser, I have a theory that the black screen problem may be something to do with the Intel viiv Quick Resume Feature. I have read that this enables the machine to exist in a "new" state with the screen and audio turned off... I have also heard this called "Away Mode". I read some stuff on the Intel site that suggested there could be problems similar to those we are experiencing so I have just turned the feature OFF (it has its own tab in the Control Panel - Power Management function). Not been running like this for long enough to draw any proper conclusions but system does appear to be going in to standby more cleanly... so I have high hopes

I have noticed that in a number of different areas the XL201 has different software loaded to do the same job.. for example there is a VAIO media server function and an Intel Viiv media server and also Windows Media Player 11 offers a media library sharing facility. I suspect that Sony dont do much testing to see how these interact and the Quick Resume is another example... Its not clear if we need Quick Resume - MCE should handle standby correctly itself.

I will try to recreate your audio problem - i think I saw something like that some weeks ago.

[Omnislash]

About your music problem..

Are you playing it through the HDMI cable to the tv? Or is it through an apm via optical etc?

If its through the hdmi cable it makes sense the sound would jump but I would have expected it to stop completly when you change AV.