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I'm trying to find a way to detect when my computer decides I've been away (no user input) long enough to turn off the display. That also means I'm not watching movies and the OS is not prohibited from turning off the display by any media players.
So far I found out that it may be possible to schedule a task to run if an event occurs, through Task Scheduler, a built-in Windows component. But I couldn't find such an event as turning on (off) the display in system event logs. Is there even such an event to begin with? Maybe I'm not using the correct tools for the job.
Anyway, I'd like to be able to detect when Windows turns the display on and off (two separate events) so that I could run a certain process when these events occur. How do I do that?
Note: I need this to work reliably when the screen is turned on or off by Windows, so any timers and applications "watching" after media players are not the desired solution.
user1306322
Posted 2013-08-09T23:08:40.183
Reputation: 4 237
Do you mean automatically? Or with a script that you have to run manually? – imtheman – 2013-08-09T23:30:00.557
I'd like the process to be suspended when the OS thinks I'm away without me doing anything, because it's obviously impossible, since I will not be present at the computer at that moment. – user1306322 – 2013-08-10T00:04:58.810
Assuming the program hasn't been discontinued by the author, I would contact said author and make a bug report. This won't help much, short-term, but long-term you and anyone else using this program might benefit from this bug being squashed. – TSJNachos117 – 2013-08-10T00:24:05.263
What process? what is "going nuts"? We cannot see what is occuring, although you could explain it. . Why do you allow the computer to go into any sleep/standby modes of any sort if the program does not behave in those circumstances? – Psycogeek – 2013-08-10T01:01:08.480
What kind of process is it? Can you give more information? Apart from this, the only thing I would say is that it doesn't seem that the process is working as well as it should. EDIT: Anyway... as stated previously in a (now deleted) post, the Task Scheduler has the ability to run programs and scripts at a certain time. It has actually a lot of functions that might help solve your problem, and if the options don't suffice you could make a script that kills the process. – Doktoro Reichard – 2013-08-09T23:34:55.630
It's a lighting manager application that can't handle a few things when the computer is in "away" mode. The developers are gone and I'm still trying to enjoy their little piece of software, but apparently it wasn't made for modern OSs. – user1306322 – 2013-08-10T00:09:20.503
Define "away" mode please. I believe it might have something to do with the power management configurations. If every power saving configuration is off (by this I say no screen saver, no monitor shutting off, no disks shutting off, etcetera) then, it may be either a bug, as stated before, or something else, to which we need more information. – Doktoro Reichard – 2013-08-10T00:36:57.660
1It has to do with the application that tries to do the amount of work it could during my break, making the PC unresponsive for as long as I was away. I can't debug that, the developers aren't there anymore for that too, so this is an attempt to work around this issue. But did you really need that information to answer my question? – user1306322 – 2013-08-10T01:01:14.143
Only to understand it. "Away" can mean a lot of things... At any rate it seems workarounds such as the ones mentioned above will work. – Doktoro Reichard – 2013-08-10T02:25:07.130