WinXP Screen Saver

[David]

I run WinXP SP3. My problem here is the timing of the screensaver. With the
initial delay set at say 10 minutes, well of late windows just does not play
ball on time at all. Sometimes the machine will sit for hours and the
screensaver will not activate, then it may activate after say 15 minutes,
etc, then to add insult to injury, after activation generally it will run
for say 10 minutes, then revert to the desktop. All of the above times are
quite ramdom.

I cannot think as to why I should have this randomness, any ideas please.
Dave

 

[Twayne]

In

I run WinXP SP3. My problem here is the timing of the
screensaver. With the initial delay set at say 10 minutes,
well of late windows just does not play ball on time at
all. Sometimes the machine will sit for hours and the
screensaver will not activate, then it may activate after
say 15 minutes, etc, then to add insult to injury, after
activation generally it will run for say 10 minutes, then
revert to the desktop. All of the above times are quite
ramdom.
I cannot think as to why I should have this randomness, any
ideas please. Dave

You have a task or background program running, most likely,
that makes it think the computer is not idle? Or perhaps you
have a conflicting setting between power settings? Give them
all a look-see.
Killing "Wake on LAN" covers a lot of different things; you
might try that.
Any chance a pet or vibrations or something else is moving
the mouse even just a tiny bit? I had a ball mouse once that
would very slowly "crawl" over time.

It doesn't really sound like malware, but you might run same
anyway, just for grins.

Interesting symptoms; please let us know the outcome.

Twayne`

 

[Tim Meddick]

In addition to the very good insights "Twayne" has put forward, I would like to ad
that, sometimes, it can be the screensaver that you use that causes this.

Some are "over-sensitive" when it comes to processes that should be interpreted as
"background" applications, some screensavers detect them as user-input instead.

Your best bet is to use a screensaver that came with WinXP rather than a third-party
one.

The most basic ones you could try being either "logon.scr" or "scrnsave.scr" listed
in the "Screensaver" tab of "Display Properties" under the names "Windows XP" and
"Blank" respectively.

As I said, you have a better chance that, with either of these, you will not suffer
those unwelcomed interruptions...

==

Cheers, Tim Meddick, Peckham, London.

 

[David]

Thankyou Twayne and Tim for your i/p, I wish I could say all is OK with the
screensaver

I checked the BIOS and cleared Lan activation, etc. I made a new dir for the
"slides" that I run in screensaver mode, I even made new slides, all BMP's.
I have looked at a number of things, yes I looked at power settings -
Monitor off after 20 mins, machine off after 1 hour; yes and I took out the
firewall and AV along with the modem, all out for 24 hours. I think I can
safely rule out vibration, I certainly have no cat or flapping curtains, but
the above and a number of other housekeeping eye's and tee's all dotted,
well the screensaver still does as before in particular, runs for about 10
mins then back to desktop we go.
I have in the back of my mind yet another clean sweep of the C partition,
reformat and all. I really wonder if Win7 is any better than XP in this
regard as I have re-installed XP many, many times, at least of late I use an
image to re-install which saves the humbug of ringing Bill's mob for re
activation.

regards

 

[Tim Meddick]

My goodness!! - You are going to re-install XP because of this?!!

XP (and, most likely, Win7 as well ) has many "quirks" that crop up, many are due to
unexpected conflicts of code belonging to one's chosen array of installed softwares.
Or similar conflicts with the OS and the particular PC architecture.

I very much doubt that Windows (or ANY O.S. for that matter) will ever be completely
free of all "bugs", as these "quirks" are more commonly know as.

I recommended that you tried a different screen-saver in my last posted reply - did
you try that?

If it is the case that you just "must have" the Slide-Show screensaver, then I advise
you to look for, and try out a third-party Slide-Show screensaver before you go for
the extreme solution of re-installing Windows.

It may be the case that if you did go to the lengths of a re-install, that the
problem *would* go away - for a while, at least.

But given that you are using the same XP OS, on the same PC and by the same user
[you!] that after a time, the same thing will happen (it's akin to banging your head
against a wall!).

Try to find a work-around, my advice is, again, look for a [free] alternative
screensaver that does the same thing...

==

Cheers, Tim Meddick, Peckham, London.


P.S. I did a quick search for "slideshow screensaver freeware" and got the following
result :

http://www.freewaresite.com/screensavers/slideshow.html

...and the direct download link :
http://www.freewaresite.com/screensavers/slideshow07.exe