I have a Dell Inspiron 570 Desktop, with Windows 7. Lately, an unattended screen will lapse into black, with the box indicating power saver, instead of going to my regular screen saver. Is there any way to correct this?
And you verified your power saving settings haven’t changed? Does a different screen saver work properly?
I tried that: I switched to another screen saver–it didn’t make any difference.
Is there any reason why you need a screensaver? They’ve been completely unnecessary for about 15 years now.
They look pretty, some of them.
Read this and see if there is something there that solves your issue: Windows 7 Power Options and Sleep Modes Explained
Yeah…I used to have some really cool screensavers. Miss them.
How so?
Screensavers are used to prevent burn-in on CRT monitors.
All computer monitors these days are LCD which do not suffer from that problem (not even a little bit).
I use one at work not to save my screen but because it locks my desktop a few minutes after I walk away. A process that keeps a screensaver from turning on may/would prevent that as well.
Having it go to sleep (or hibernating) takes a lot longer to come out which would be an issue for me since I walk away from my computer (or more accurately unlock my computer) probably 30-50 times a day.
Dougie, I don’t know if you’ve done any googling for it, but that would be a start. If your power settings haven’t changed, and that seems likely since it still goes to sleep, I’d start by googling your symptoms to see if anything sounds familiar. You may recognize something in the results list as something recently done or changed on your computer that’s now preventing yours from turning the screensaver on.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll try it. 
This is common when your hardware power saver is set to black the screen after a shorter time than the time your screen saver is set to start. Like you have your screen saver set to start after 10 minutes of inactivity, but your monitor power saver is set to come on after 7 minutes – your power saver will never get the chance to activate.
There can be this result if the picture you use for the screen saver has been deleted or moved. The solution is to re-select the picture in the setup.
And where do I find the settings that control the power saver?
Google’s your friend since every flavor of windows is different. Starting in the control panel and poking around is pretty good in general, but in the last handful of versions you can usually get to it pretty quickly by right clicking on the background and hitting Display Settings.
What you’re ultimately after is Power Settings>Advanced/Additional Power Settings menu.
As someone else mentioned, see if the setting for turning off the display is less than the amount of time before the screen saver kicks on. If it’s not, it’s possible that your screen saver is corrupt (or as was noted) if it shows pictures, the pictures aren’t being found.
Thanks for the suggestion. I used the computer search feature to find “Power Settings”; the timer was set to 10 minutes and I changed it to four hours. That way I can get my screen-saver appearance back. I like the 3D word “insegrevious” floating around the screen.
Also, modern monitors can be turned off with a command from the computer. Which saves energy. Older CRT monitors couldn’t be turned off by the computer, you had to push the switch on the monitor itself.
To be pedantic, some new high-end laptops have OLED screens, and they actually can suffer from burn-in.
Hm. I wonder if you can still get After Dark to work on anything?
It worked! The adjustment I made restored the screen saver operation and “insegrevious” is floating around as it had been doing. And to think the technician at Staples, whom I called (I had bought the computer there) couldn’t help me! 
For variables definitions of the word “off”. There were definitely CRT monitors that could be turned off by the computer. This sent them into a low power state. (In particular, the tube would turn off. When the computer wakes it there’s a lag until it warms up again.)
This low power state is similar to the low power state an LCD monitor is put in. The LCD one will use still less power, off course, but it is not actually “off”. If it were, the computer wouldn’t be able to wake it again.
Don’t confuse a device being in a low power state with actually being turned off.