Stopping a screensaver

[COKEDUDEUSF]

I'm using a computer that I'm not the admin of. I'm trying to watch a movie and every 10 bloody minutes the screensaver activates. How do I stop this from happening? The computer is active and running. I've tried watching the movie with VLC, Media Player Classic, and windows crap player and the screensaver always activates. Can I run some other program or a cmd prompt to do something every 10 minutes?

[CoffeeFiend]

I know Media Player Classic Home Cinema does this. The screen saver never kicks in while we watch a movie. Not 100% sure about the others.

[jcarle]

Take a look at this blog entry.

[COKEDUDEUSF]

Take a look at this blog entry.

How do you run it? Do you make a bat or cmd file?

1.param($minutes = 60)
2. 
3.for ($i = 0; $i -lt $minutes; $i++) {
4.  Start-Sleep -Seconds 60
5.  $Pos = [System.Windows.Forms.Cursor]::Position
6.[System.Windows.Forms.Cursor]::Position = New-Object System.Drawing.Point((($Pos.X) + 1) , $Pos.Y)
7. 
8.}

[dencorso]

Or else, install the freeware SaverNow and use it to disable the saver before playing and reenable it afterwards, just by double-clicking its icon on the tray.

[jcarle]

How do you run it? Do you make a bat or cmd file?

It is a PowerShell script. Edited September 8, 2009 by jcarle

[CoffeeFiend]

How do you run it? Do you make a bat or cmd file?

It's a powershell script (BTW, you don't want the line numbers in there), so .ps1 extension, and it requires you to have powershell installed (you don't say which OS you use, and in case you're still using XP, then you'll have to install that -- not sure if the ngen issues have been fixed either). And depending on your particular setup, you may have to digitally sign the script for it to run (I have it set so no unsigned scripts will run here, and that's the default -- in Win7 at least) i.e. use makecert to make your own or buy one, then install it on all your boxes, then sign all your scripts (or do the insecure thing, and configure it to run anything). You also have to specify the full path to the script so it'll run, and can't run it by double clicking either. And this particular script runs for 60 mins (then it starts kicking in afterwards), unless you pass minutes as a parameter to it, so you better know how long your movie watching will last including any possible breaks/pauses... Powershell rocks, but this is *way* over-complicated IMO (and way too high a learning curve for most end-users who just want to watch a movie uninterrupted)

MPC HC just works

[COKEDUDEUSF]

How do you run it? Do you make a bat or cmd file?

It's a powershell script (BTW, you don't want the line numbers in there), so .ps1 extension, and it requires you to have powershell installed (you don't say which OS you use, and in case you're still using XP, then you'll have to install that -- not sure if the ngen issues have been fixed either). And depending on your particular setup, you may have to digitally sign the script for it to run (I have it set so no unsigned scripts will run here, and that's the default -- in Win7 at least) i.e. use makecert to make your own or buy one, then install it on all your boxes, then sign all your scripts (or do the insecure thing, and configure it to run anything). You also have to specify the full path to the script so it'll run, and can't run it by double clicking either. And this particular script runs for 60 mins (then it starts kicking in afterwards), unless you pass minutes as a parameter to it, so you better know how long your movie watching will last including any possible breaks/pauses... Powershell rocks, but this is *way* over-complicated IMO (and way too high a learning curve for most end-users who just want to watch a movie uninterrupted)

MPC HC just works

I'm using XP.

It looks like powershell is a bit complicated. If it was a Java script, cmd file, bat file I would be very interested in learning . Right now I don't have very much interest in learning about Powershell.

[dencorso]

Do give SaverNow a try. It works beautifully in XP.