2.No way to shut off screen only and not the entire system. In windows power settings, turn of display means put to sleep mode. I can't say, leave my venue on all night with screen off while downloading something.

Turning off the screen does not affect sleeping, it is the sleep settings which do:

• Swipe right side of screen
• Settings
• Change PC Settings
• Power and Sleep
• Change "When plugged in, turn off after" to Never

The machine will no longer sleep when on power.  Downloads will continue unabated. 

Unless you have a 64GB model hibernation may not be a good idea. The file it uses can be rather large. It is a percent of the system memory, which admittedly is low on the V8P. I am not certain how it would work here, but it may be an issue.

I see no option to leave the screen off,while it still running. Your suggestion just keeps the screen on and stops the venue from going into sleep mode. I don't see any settings to shut off display,without going to sleep. My laptop has different options than this does. I can turn of display in 5 min. and put to sleep in 20 min. Also I tried many different suggestions and none enable hibernation. On my laptop the same steps enabled hibernate.

You appear to be correct about not being able to turn off the screen without going into sleep mode, I just verified it myself. It looks like the only option here is to set the brightness to minimum settings.

Lack of hibernation on the V8 Pro is I think intentional for devices with connected standby (as it seems is the inability to turn off just the display). See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn481218%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

Attempting to use third party utilities to turn off the display unfortunately doesn't work either, they also put the tablet to sleep, see http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/dell/60398-possible-turn-off-display-without-putting-tablet-sleep-3.html

Sadly, it seems Microsoft have once again removed another feature in the name of progress!

You just turn off the screen using the main button.

What I was saying is it prevents it from sleeping, which is what I thought you were asking.

Turning off the screen is separate from this.

I verified it worked by setting up the sleep settings as I stated above, selecting a large file to download, and turning off the screen at the beginning of the download.

The download continued and completed even though the screen was off.

Just to be clear, we do not have separate settings (see below) for Screen as you'd see on windows 8 laptops, (at least I don't).

I have the above, Brightness and then Sleep settings, there is no Screen section.

 

@NTTD Please try the following: with the settings you mentioned, set the screen timeout to 1 minute. Verify you do NOT have a screensaver active. Start some music playing in WMP and wait until the timeout. Let us know if the music continues to play with the screen off.

If it does, and you've not disabled connected standby in the registry, you've managed to do something I don't think anyone else has!

Just checked, I got a mp3 playing, turned off the screen and it kept playing.

So if you do have the section with "Screen" settings, set that to never as well.  Then just manually sleep the screen.  You will be able to turn on and off the screen while the machine continues to do what you want it to do.

Windows 8 has two lots of settings, those in the modern UI and those on the desktop (control panel). The modern UI controls are typically "dumbed down", you need to use the other settings to make many changes. The separate settings for sleep and to turn the screen off are accessible through Power Options (or via the battery icon in the taskbar). Here are the settings in question:

The reason why I asked you to play something in WMP (Windows Media Player) is that it does not appear to support connected standby, whereas the "Music" modern app does. So playing an MP3 would work in "sleep" mode with Music, but not with WMP. This is regardless of whether you manually press the button or not. Please can you clarify whether you played your MP3 in WMP or using the default Music app.

Sir you are correct, WMP does not play when the screen is off, and upon further testing I found that the same goes for iTunes.

I was indeed using the default music playing app Xbox Music which does not have this issue.

It is now apparent that app functionality while the screen is off but the machine is not sleeping varies with the app, and is not absolutely limited by the OS.

As far as downloads continuing with the screen off, I found that so far it only works with Firefox using the "DownThemAll!" extension.  As this is my default setup I did not notice an issue at first.