Every once in awhile I’d find after leaving my Thinkpad for awhile that I’d find the screen blank. No matter what I did I could not get it to come back.

I finally figured out a workaround. By pressing Fn + Spacebar I decreased the screen resolution and the screen was displayed again. I then pressed Fn + Spacebar again to get back to my original display and then had to move back windows to where they were and resize some.

After doing this too many times I finally did a Google search to find out what was wrong. Fortunately this turned out to be a common problem, both on Windows and Linux.

Using the Windows Device Manager I saw that the driver for my ThinkPad PM (Power Management) Device was version 1.33.0.0. According to this page the latest driver is 1.43.0.0.

I updated this driver using ThinkVantage’s System Update utility (under Start Menu > ThinkVantage). I actually had to run the Software Installer which, because it was out of date, uninstalled itself and updated the System Update. Then when I ran the System Update it pulled down the driver update as part of its recommended updates.

So far the update seems to be working.

12/03/2007 – Turns out the update did not fix this problem. I then ran System Update and updated all critical and recommended updates. I am not sure if this solved the problem but I did notice my display now sometimes flickers. 🙁