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Posted on: 2008-11-09 00:16:51

Have you ever been giving a presentation, or watching a movie, or showing someone some photos on your laptop, and you have to keep moving the mouse because the screen keeps blanking out?

Here's a quick little Windows XP/Vista tray application that I made to disable the screensaver and standby modes.

Download StandbyPreventerInstall.exe

It's actually quite hard to implement these things. No wonder VLC media player gets it wrong (and allows screen blanking during video playback).

Here are the things that I handled:

You enable a screensaver while Standby Preventer is working. The screensaver remains disabled until you allow standby again.
You have a configuration that allows screen blanking only when computer is on battery power (or only AC, etc). In this case, when you switch from AC to battery power, Windows does not inform applications that screen blanking has been enabled via the normal method. Standby Preventer correctly handles this.

A naive implementation might ignore the fact that the user could change their power settings (eg. disable the screensaver or screen blanking), and overwrite these settings with stored ones when allowing standby again. Standby Preventer goes through great pains to handle this.

Complaint

There doesn't appear to be any free way to create MS conformant Windows Icon files. Icons are special image files that contain several sizes of the same image. Visual Studio 6.0 was that last version of the official development environment that had the ability to do it [in its resource editor], and that was released 8 years ago. Apparently, Photoshop can do it. Gimp cannot. I used Gimp, which is why my icon files contain only a 16x16 image, and probably look like crap in Vista.

Bye bye, Windows 95

As a side note, this is the first application that I have ever made that doesn't run on Windows 95. I just didn't bother for this one, although it would be trivial.

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Chris

2009-03-16 05:50:01

Uhh.. what's wrong with the icon editor in later versions of Visual Studio? Works just fine for me...

Edit

Steve Hanov

2009-03-16 09:48:09

Chris: I checked Visual Studio Express edition (2005 is what I currently have) and it doesn't have any way to create icons that I can find. I suspect you have to buy the standard edition.

Edit

Steve

2009-05-18 01:02:55

Thanks a bunch! I got so tired of having to reenable standby after every time I used VLC.

Edit

Flavien

2009-06-16 07:43:05

Great tool!

Quick question: nostandby.exe is also preventing the screen locking mechanism, is this by design? If yes, is there a way to prevent standby, but still allow Windows to lock the screen? Maybe an undocumented feature in application.xml?

This is for security reason. My current workaround is to press [Win]-[L] manually.

Regarding icon creation on Windows, have a look at IcoFX, the most capable freeware I've found for this task.

Edit

Joe Frambach

2009-06-30 11:09:27

Holding down the ctrl key does the trick, no tinkering involved. I usually balance the mouse on the corner of the keyboard, just enough to depress ctrl.

Edit

Chris

2009-11-06 10:08:25

Nice tool. I only have one wish: It should be possible to start it in "prevent standby"-mode. This way it doesn't need to be running all the time, you just start it (e.g. with a keyboard shortcut) in case you are giving a presentation and want to prevent standby.

Edit

omega_red

2010-05-04 11:05:09

i agree with Chris on the "prevent standby" mode enabled on app start. Is there a startup parameter or something like that?

Edit

steve.hanov@gmail.com

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