Backlight off after 5-7 seconds no matter what

[Guest highmighty]

Hi all,

The backlight of my SP5m (WM6 perfect ed.) turns off after 5-7 seconds no matter what values I set. I've tried many different places to modify this value but none of them worked. Which registry settings should I add/modify? Could it be related to the LowLight software that dim the screen? This one also seems to act a little special after "some" reboots?!

Any help would be appreciated before an hard-reset...

Thank you for your time,

highmighty

[Guest Paul (MVP)]

5-7 seconds? Weirdness! Lowlight? What is that?

P

[Guest waxpickle]

Same problem. Solution below. Not my post. Copied from another smartphone forum.

Okay, I have solved the mystery of the display timeout problem! It's easy once you know it (but then isn't everything?).

I still don't know what actually causes it but the symptom is that no matter what display timeout you set (30 sec, 1 min), as soon as you lock the keyboard, either manually or with AutoKeylock, it will be reset to 7 seconds and stay there.

With a bit of investigation and a couple of hard resets I worked out that in this section...

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Power

There is usually one key when the keypad is unlocked. The "Display" key shows your normal setting in seconds (30, 60, etc). When you lock the keypad, the "Display" setting is changed to 7 seconds (7) because that's sensible for when the keypad is locked. At the same time it creates a new key called "TimeoutSaved" which is your normal (30, 60, etc) setting. Now under normal conditions, when you unlock the keypad, the "TimeoutSaved" is deleted and the "Display" key is reset to your normal setting (30, 60 etc).

For some reason, on mine the "Display" key was not being reset, it was staying on 7 seconds.

So the fix is easy. In the subfolder...

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Power\LockLevel

there is a key called "LockLevel" and it has been set to "3" or "4" (don't know how or by what program). All you need to do is reset it to 0. Fixed.

Like I said, it's easy when you know but it took a bit of messing about to see exactly what was happening.

Hope this is useful to anyone having the same problem (I know it happened to ega2002 so it might be quite common). No more hard resets or reflashing

[Guest Paul (MVP)]

Good find! Nice one!

P