I work for a company whose IT department has a group policy enforced so that our screens lock after 10 minutes of inactivity. That’s great in theory, but I run my corporate workstation inside VMware, which means I’m back and forth between different windows all the time. When I go away from my Windows VM for 10 minutes and come back, the screen is locked – pain in the rear.
Jason Hall of Quest pointed out the fix: a free screensaver prevention app called Caffeine. On Windows 2000 and Windows XP, it does a left-shift-up event every minute, thereby defeating screen saver lockouts. Add a shortcut to it in your Startup menu, and presto, never get locked out again.
Now I wonder how many system administrators are going to update their group policy objects to prevent this screen saver from running.
Any idea how I can keep my desktop from re-booting overnight after updates have been installed? It’s in our group policy, but I often lose query work because of it.
@Mike Hillwig Absolutely none.