Disable screen saver by machine, rather than user

[keybrdcowboy]

Ok, this sounds like it should be really simple, but I have been trying to figure this out for about 3 days now. We have a domain group policy that sets the password to come on after 5 mins, and lock the workstation. Well, for people doing briefings and such, that is inconveinent. I need to set a group policy (or any way that will work will be fine) to disable the screen saver on a group of machines. AD only has settings for the screen saver via username, not machine. Anyone know of a way to get this to work? Thanks.

 

[aftertaf]

new gpo, linked to an OU containing the users you want to affect...
and change the user settings to deactivate screensaver...

you cant do it via machine settings (at least, not with GPO, there is no control panel/display node in machine config...) nor with registry tweaking (looking to confirm this...) because screensaver settings are in HKCurrent User node...

checking up tho...





Aftertaf (david)

 

[keybrdcowboy]

Thanks for the reply..... I can't do it via usernames (or at least that is going to be the last possible solution) because this is intended for when people are using those particular machines to do briefings. But when they go back to their regular machines, I would like it to be back to normal. I have mostly been focusing on a script to change the registry settings, but so far no luck. You can make changes in there, but they don't take affect. Guess you would have to restart the machine for it to see the new registry settings, and then it would just pull the GPO down again, and then just be a big circle. Anyways, any help would be great.... thanks.

 

[aftertaf]

secedit \refreshpolicy user_policy /enforce
or a .reg file rechanging back the settings, that they click on to change the screensaver......

Aftertaf (david)

 

[keybrdcowboy]

here's what I ended up doing. I just wrote a script that changes the registry values (As an interesting note, when editing the screen saver registry settings, if you change the timeout values or the isactive values, it doesn't make a difference. But if you change the path of the scrnsave.exe to nothing, then that works.) and put that script in the startup folder on the local machine. (rather than pushing it as a group policy logon script) This is working. Thanks for the help.

 

[aftertaf]

Aftertaf (david)