Comments on: I do not wish my screensaver to lock my computer, thank you.

By: danny

danny — Thu, 05 May 2011 15:23:24 +0000

okay. this is good info. if your laptop is provided by the company, you will be using a local profile meaning that as long as the bios isn’t locked and you can boot from other media and the hard drive is not encrypted you can still copy the ntuser.dat file from the users profile, edit it with regedit and then place it back in the profile on the laptop. not many companies bother encrypting hard drives which is really the only way to protect against users modifying there security settings or adding themselves to the local administrators group.

By: Reon

Reon — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 10:03:58 +0000

Even if i am changing it in the registry it reverts back after some time and the screensaver still kicks in. Like Bob mentioned above in the thread i checked the GPO setting in GPEDIT.MSC. but screensaver is not configured at all in that.

Can anything else be done to disable the screensaver?

By: sandra

sandra — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 18:20:22 +0000

Thank you so much, Matt. I was going bonkers having to sign into my work laptop with my crazy password after the screensaver locked my computer every 5 minutes (which is extra silly, considering I work from home)!!! Display properties settings was disabed, but regedit was not. I tried several other “fixes” to no avail. This worked like a charm.

By: Arjun

Arjun — Thu, 14 May 2009 06:22:11 +0000

How can I set 0 on Vista machine. Can you please help finding the below path on Vista machine.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software Policies > Microsoft > Windows > Control Panel > Desktop

By: Bob

Bob — Wed, 13 May 2009 02:45:57 +0000

If you can’t change the setting in the Control Panel but you can edit the registry key, then the setting is being forced by a GPO. In which case, when the GPO refreshes locally it will revert back.

By: Andy

Andy — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 22:19:11 +0000

Setting the value for 30 does not change it to 30 minutes. It’s basically just a true/false statement. If you set it to 0, it means it will not be secure. If you set it to any positive (and probably negative) number, it will be secure.

The location of the “ScreenSaverIsSecure” registry key may be in different locations depending on what version of Windows you have, so you could always just search for “screensaverissecure” and change the value to “0″

If it doesn’t work, search multiple registry entries or other “screensaver” entries that a 3rd party security application might have placed.

Good luck

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 21:53:56 +0000

This is an awesome idea.
My company just went to the ole 15 minute password policy and it kills me.
Makes it even worse when they require some convoluted password. My company does not do that yet, but is implementing that type of policy at the next password change.
Regarding the question by John, the ScreenSaveTimeOut value appears to be seconds. To get to thirty minutes, you could probably change that to 1800.

By: jOHN

jOHN — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:49:07 +0000

* Run ‘regedit’ to edit your registry
* Navigate down the tree to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software Policies > Microsoft > Windows > Control Panel > Desktop and look for an entry ScreenSaverIsSecure. You want to make sure the value for ScreenSaverIsSecure is 0 (zero).
* Exit regedit; you’re done!

Can you change it to say 30 mins. by using 30 instead of 0 (zero)?

By: Shay

Shay — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:32:58 +0000

Hi all.

As a system admin I can tell you that registry is locked for users not admin, but…

The issue is that the registry is open only for a section called HKEY_CURRENT_USER, and since this is a per user policy, you can change it via the registry. If you couldn’t, then you wouldn’t have access to regular things users can do.

Cheers.

By: John

John — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:18:31 +0000

Awesome thanks!

- I’m in the same boat actually – can regedit but have above policy set…

Anyway you inspired me to look up the edit for windows 2000

see link above – it is in contrrol panel/desktop