Aargh. My at-work PCs are forcing a screensaver with a password after 15 minutes of inactivity. Well.. I won’t put up with that.
I work in a office that must comply with province-wide rules for computer security, and apparently someone decided it’s required to force PCs into screensaver and require them to enter a password to resume work, if there was no mouse or keyboard activity for 15 minutes.
I work with 3 PCs in my office, totalling 7 big monitors. I’m sitting right here!… no security risk of an unattended PC in an empty office.
What’s my solution, and why is this worth posting? (you wonder, but keep reading… I’m teaching how to get things done.)
vWorker.com I use it a lot as a “buyer”. I posted a very simple job, and within 5 minutes someone had bid on it, and within an hour, I had the finished app.
For $15, I got an app that watches for mouse and keyboard activity, and gives a slight wiggle of the mouse, if there is no activity after 14 minutes. That prevents the screensaver from coming on.
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Update April 7. I’ve uploaded the mouse wiggling app. It’s free. Do me a favor though, and give Talking Moose some free publicity somehow. I suppose I should tell you more about this little app. It’s only 917KB (939,008 bytes). It has no windows or configuration, (by design). It has a tiny icon in the system tray that provides a right-click pop-up menu to Exit. There are probably other mouse wiggling apps available elsewhere, but do you trust their download sites? (Hopefully you trust me, Steven B. Halls MD, that this app has no viruses.)
May 22 2013 update. This mouse wiggler, jiggle mouse application is awesome. I’m suprised it doesn’t get downloaded more. So I’m adding a few more paragraphs about it, and maybe that will help it show up a bit more prominently on google searches. It’s like a fake mouse input, but not a click, just a 1 pixel wiggle or slight movement of the mouse position, and it only occurs if there has been no preceeding mouse movement or keypresses for 14 minutes. As a mouse jiggler, as a tiny application that prevents screen saver, this is one of the best. Yes, now I’m being redundant, saying the same thing in a different way, for the benefit of google search keywords, it prevents screensaver activating and PC locking, it stops your computer from going to sleep. Yes, it stops screensaver, circumvents screen saver group policy, it avoids screensaver activation.