I set my computer (Windows 10, 19045, but I’ve had this problem for years) to turn the screens off (not sleep!) after 5 min of idling. It works perfectly. After 5 mins of idling, my monitors turn off. I can also use apps (like Unified Remote) to trigger that behavior.
However, if an update is available (as indicated by the orange badge):
This stops working. As soon as the monitors turn off, they turn back on again after about a second.
If the behavior is forced (e.g. through Unified Remote), they will stay on after that. If the behavior is automatic (after the idling delay), the screens will just turn off and on and keep on with this blinking behavior until some manual input “wakes” Windows out of this loop. It’s quite distracting when I’m in the same room, since I’m then stuck with two blinking monitors in my line of sight until I get up and move the mouse.
Restarting the computer fixes the problem, since the updates get installed. However, this is not always a solution. I may have a long-running task (computation, model training, download) that I can’t interrupt, while wanting to leave my home without worrying about my monitors blinking.
Disabling the “turn off monitors after idling” setting fixes the problem, obviously, but this is not a solution.
Is this a known issue? I’ve been unable to find anything on the infamous TechNet forums or anywhere else on the Internet about this, and finding answers about anything Windows or Windows Update-related these days is difficult anyways since all answers are “did you try sfc /scannow?”.
About that last paragraph, yes, I did try sfc /scannow, I did try restoring the system image using DISM, and “installing updates is good” is not helpful since as I said, I expect my computer to be able to have an uptime of more than a few hours. This is a recurrent, predictable, deterministic problem.
Group Policy was helpful in removing the incessant notifications and unwanted reboots, but I found no “Make Screen Blink when Updates Ready” setting, unfortunately.
