A different kind of black screen

Hey y'all.

I seem to be having an interesting problem lately. I was recently on vacation and a few days ago during vacation my Dell laptop (running W7 x64) would black screen. Now, I have read other problems and I can assure you that this is NOT the start-up black screen problem. This is something entirely new.

What happens is if I leave my laptop unattended for a few minutes, the screen will fade to black as if it was going into a screensaver. Only problem- I have no screensaver set at all and hibernate is completely off. The screen will return back to normal if I unplug my laptop or press any buttons/move the mouse pointer. Sometimes the black screening causes some worrying problems (or at least to me they're worrying). Basically what happens is when the screen comes back to normal, everything is messed up. The mouse movements are horribly jittery, left click is now right click, right click opens control panel, all my keyboard keys are messed up, my start menu disappears (only happened once), and the weirdest of all, the power button opens the start menu.

Now, I thought I had contracted a trojan or another virus. That's not the case. I scanned with 5 anti-virus programs and they all found nothing. I recently thought that maybe somehow my Windows directory got corrupted. It didn't which made me think maybe I downloaded a bad update on my laptop. But then after I got home from vacation, I turn on my desktop computer (which runs Windows 7 x86). To my surprise when I woke up, my desktop screen is black. It's doing the exact same thing my laptop is doing. My desktop wasn't even turned on at all while I was on vacation and hasn't even been updated since a few days before I actually left for vacation. What bothers me is the fact that BOTH of my computers are doing it.

I've tried repair installs (which don't work), sfc /scannow with the Windows 7 disc, and powercfg.exe -h off. All of which have not fixed the problem.

Is anyone else experiencing this problem? Or does anyone have any helpful advice to hopefully fix this problem?

I've tried contacting Microsoft, but they wont reply back. So I'm hoping someone here has an answer as to what's going on.

Hey. Thanks for the reply and the welcome. =)

Well, both my laptop and desktop were on High Performance power settings since as long as I can remember. My laptop, I found out, somehow changed it's own "dim the display" settings so that it dims the display after 10 minutes. I myself did not set it to do that. I changed it back to "never" and my laptop isn't black screening anymore.

My desktop, however, is still doing this. Since it's a desktop, it does not have the "dim the display" option(s) at all.

I'm quite stumped as to what might have caused this problem (and is still causing it). Especially since my desktop has been completely shut down for about a week.