monline

Sometimes system administrators set a shorter (than agreeable) idle timeout for your screensaver (eg. via group policy) and do not grant you the rights to change it. Eg. some people think that 10 minutes of "inactivity" (ie. no mouse or keypress) must mean that you've left your computer and it must be locked to prevent malicious access. Obviously I'm not such an administrator and I think that enforcing this kind of security assuming everybody is a moron and incapable of locking their workstation if going away is a bad thing (locking every workstation after 10m of inactivity will not improve the company security ... in fact I believe that it'll just make everybody angry and it'll drive people to try to circumvent the limitation ... sometimes opening a lot larger security whole in the process).

There're a number of ways to work around the screensaver timeout so why bother with it at all? Let's see a few ...

• My favourite is: put your optical mouse on an alarm clock. The alarm clock should face upwards so the beam of the LED in the mouse gets interrupted by the clock's hands). It doesn't get any more simple than that. Of course the cursor jumping around the screen might prevent you from doing whatever you tried to do in the first place (read/understand something, watch a presentation, etc.).
• Use a utility. There're quite a few. I consider Caffeine a simple and elegant solutation, but your mileage may vary.
• Use a script. There're many variants of VBScripts or PowerShell scripts that try to prevent the screensaver from kicking in, some do it with success, some fail. I've attached a very short and simple VBScript (ss.vbs) which worked for me in many situations and environments (tested in Windows XP SP3 and 2008 R2), but of course there's no guarantee that it'll work for you too. Here's the source for it:
  
  Dim WshShell
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Do While True
        WshShell.SendKeys("{F15}")
        WScript.Sleep(55000)
Loop
  It fires the F15 keypress event every 55 seconds. Just double-click the script (or put it in your Startup folder) and enjoy a locking-free Windows session.
  (Note: if you cannot download it, just fire up your notepad and copy&paste the code into it. But beware that notepad will save the file most probably with a *.txt extension and double-clicking a *.txt will not launch the script for you. I should also mention that if you use this script in a Terminal Service session and minimize the Terminal Service client's window, the screen will get locked just as usually. I guess you cannot send keys in the session via SendKeys() if it's minimized.)
• Or as a last (or first? ) measure: you might try to talk senses into your administrator/boss/whatever. In a large company this might prove to be difficult and if you've to convince more than one or two guys, you might not succeed. But still, it's worth a try.

Since the stupid screensaver timeout can be easily fooled in a number of ways, why do some admins think of it as some sort of "first line of defense"? The basic rule of computer (and actually any sort of) security is: if one has physical access to something, it can be assumed that she/he can hack into it. If somebody relies on an idiotic 10 minute (or less) screensaver timeout to provide security, chances are her/his network got already hacked by some annoyed coworker.

Attachment	Size
ss.vbs	135 bytes