Thinkpads Forum

usually you can control how much idle time passes before the screen saver turns on. i can't. i have admin control.

http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/8088/untitled7ps.jpg

Screen savers are unnecessary on laptops.

They're a waste of memory, run constantly in the background and burn the backlight for no good reason.

Just set the display to turn off after some period of idle time.

Regards,

James

JHEM wrote:Screen savers are unnecessary on laptops.

Its not an absolute, it depends great deal on what the laptop is used for.

Cheers,

Bill

bill bolton wrote:

JHEM wrote:Screen savers are unnecessary on laptops.

Its not an absolute, it depends great deal on what the laptop is used for.

For instance?

Other than eye candy, a screensaver is of no possible benefit to a laptop.

The days of screen burn-in, the primary reason screensavers were developed, are far behind us and never really affected LCDs in any case.

Many people are unaware that a screensaver runs constantly in the background, just waiting to come to the fore when it has timed out its idle setting. While the memory used by the program when it's running is small, for some folks with older Thinkpads it can negatively impact overall performance.

For those concerned with backlight service life, again particularly on older Thinkpads, it's a greater benefit to backlight life to simply have the display turn off after a set period of time rather than display a screensaver.

Regards,

James

A few of my friends use the password feature in their screensaver to protect their systems in case they walk away and forget to log out.

I don't remember if the password feature is available when resuming from a powered off display.

tfflivemb2 wrote:I don't remember if the password feature is available when resuming from a powered off display.

No, although it can be set to prompt for a PW when resuming from Standby.

Regards,

James

so about my problem. i still would like to be able to control my screensaver.

Do you get the same result if you choose a different screensaver, such as te XP Screen saver? I am thinking that maybe it doesn't work, because you have "blank" chosen.

JHEM wrote:For instance?

Another poster has already given one good reason for using a screen saver.

For those who work in teams, screensaver facilities can used to convey a wide range of information which can be useful to the team, such as the likely time of return of the user of the system, or a mobile contact number for the system owner, or whether they have a job running that should not be disturbed etc etc.

Also, for those who deliver a professional service, just popping up a company logo as the screensaver is a low cost "Billboard" for the corporate service brand when working on a customer site.

I sometimes run a rotating slide show of IT related cartoons as my screen saver, especialy when I'm first at a new customer site. People often come up to me and talk about the content of cartoons, or how I set it up the slide show etc, which gives me a quick way of building a contact network in the organisations, put faces to names etc etc.

It has nothing to do with laptop technology per se, but rather what business purpose the computer system is being used for!

Cheers,

Bill

bill bolton wrote:Another poster has already given one good reason for using a screen saver.

And your's were icing on the cake.

Thanks Bill, very thought provoking.

How's the "Loo"?

Regards,

James

It seems to me that you have a software policy in effect. Is this a work laptop?

Craig

windows f'd up. had to format

JHEM wrote:Screen savers are unnecessary on laptops.

Forgot one thing, James. Setting the default screensaver (blanks screen), with a 5 minute timeout, and requiring password to resume is a good security precaution in an open work environment. Of course as you say, the display can be set to turn off in 30 minutes as well, but the system is still locked from sneaky coworkers.

I usually lock my system manually at work with a keyboard shortcut or QuickLaunch bar button. But for those who forget, or aren't managers with information to protect, the scrnsave.scr is a nice backup, as tfflivemb2 pointed out.

Bill, I like your ideas. Never thought of those.

Fartonmyear, I suspect that your system is in a work environment and the domain has a policy whch prevents users, even local system administrators, from changing that. Just a guess on my part.