While I was shopping for presents last Christmas, I kept having family members wander by and closely eyeball my screen. Not good. I know if I leave the mouse alone for a few minutes that my screen saver will launch, but is there a way to have it immediately launch to keep my screen away from prying eyes?
There is a way to do that, and not only can you set what’s called a “hot spot” to immediately launch your screen saver, but you can also set it up to be locked immediately too, so that if they did touch the mouse, it’d prompt them for your password rather than just clear the screen.
Since you don’t specify what you’re running, I’ll show you how to do this for a Mac because there’s no analogous capability in Windows.
Go to System Preferences off the Apple menu and look along the top for “Desktop and Screen Saver”:
Click on it, then notice that you can choose from one of a bunch of different screen savers here (if you’re seeing background info, click on “Screen Saver” on the top bar).
It’s easy to miss, click on “Hot Corners…” in the lower left and you’ll see that the corners of your screen can be assigned specific properties:
I already have the top right corner of my screen set to launch the screen saver immediately, but it turns out that there are a number of options:
Pick what works for you – and don’t hesitate to assign different functions to different corners either, just to experiment with the features.
That’s all there is to it!
Well, here’s a long way to do it on Windows…
Create a .bat file containing these two lines:
=====
FOR /F “tokens=2* ” %%A IN (‘reg query “hkcu\control panel\desktop” /v “scrnsave.exe”‘) DO SET Saver=%%B
%Saver% /s
=====
That first line is the “magic code” to read the Windows registry to read the current screen saver setting.
Next, create a shortcut to it on the desktop. (Right-click the desktop, select “new / shortcut”.) Point the shortcut to the .bat file you created above. Name the shortcut whatever you want. (I chose “start screen saver”.)
(Alternately, you can hard-code the screen saver you want to use, and simply create a shortcut to it, making sure to pass the “/s” flag, such as “c:\windows\system32\mystify.scr /s”.)
Finally, set a “shortcut key” for that shortcut. (Right-click the icon and select “properties”. Click the “shortcut key” box, and press a key, such as Ctrl-Alt-S.)
Now, pressing that shortcut key, or double-clicking the icon, will start the .bat file, which launches the current screen saver.
While I agree that you cannot activate the screensaver in Windows, you can quickly lock the computer. They are, however, only effective if you actually have password security set on your account.
There are two methods for this.
First, holding down the Windows key and pressing the L key. This will cause the computer to lock the desktop.
Second, you can create an icon on the desktop that performs the same function. There is an article here with instructions on doing so:
http://www.petri.co.il/create_quick_launch_shortcuts_lock_computer_restart_shutdown.htm
(please note, I am not associated with petri in any way, although I find them to be a very good source of information)