As the title asks (Windows 7). (How) can I change the time until the screensaver kicks in from the command line? Is it even possible?
Normally I am happy with a 5 minute setting, but occasionally I want to make it longer. I would like the two lengths bound to hot-keys (I know how to do that).
I guess I could record two macros and use those, but I just wondered if there are any command line options (including registry updates) that I can use to tell Windows to start the screen saver after X minutes of inactivity.
(please note, I do not want to start the screen saver immediately; I want to change the length of time Windows will wait before starting it)
Thanks in advance.
[Answer] I finally used a variation on the answer from @Gjordis – but all credit goes to him.
I didn't see why we needed 3 operations : add, delete then rename and reduced that to two.
Since I want to bind to a hotkey, I need to execute two comamnds in one. Normally, one can separate the commands with a semicolon and issue them on one line (e.g dir c:;dir d:). That gave errors with the reg command, so in the end I have two batch files. The contens are identitcal, only the duration changes.
On strange thing – the value is correctly written to the registry, but Control Panel/Personalize/Screen saver does not alwys update its GUI. However, I tested and the screen saver does behave as expected.
@echo off
reg delete "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop" /v ScreenSaveTimeOut /f
reg add "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop" /v ScreenSaveTimeOut /t REG_SZ /d 180 /f
If this helps you, please upvote the question 😉
Best Answer
The value 600 is in seconds, = 10minutes Interestingly, as pointed, this works only the first time. On next change, you need to make a new key like so :
Then delete the old one
Then copy the new one to the right name
Hopy this works, and you do not destory your computer, but since you did not have this registry value, i don't think deleting it can be that horrible.
REG documentation here: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/reg.mspx?mfr=true