Well not really a screen saver, but I have my monitor set to turn off after a certain amount of time (20 mins I think). My question is, why does it not work sometimes? Usually it works fine, but about 10% of the time (sometimes more) it doens’t work. It’ll stay on for hours and hours. BTW I’m running XP Pro.
bump
In your control panel, go to “Power Options” and click on that. A window will pop up. Click on the dropdown menu for “Turn Off Monitor” under “Settings For Home/Office Desk power Scheme”. You should find different time settings there, ranging from 1 minute to 5 hours to never. It is probably defaulted to 20 minutes, which means that after 20 minutes of inactivity, your monitor shuts off as a power saving option.
Hope this was what you’re looking for.
I don’t have an answer for you, but this happens to me as well at work where I run Windows 2000 Server. I know the settings are correct, because it usually works, but as you say, occasionally I’ll come in the next morning and the monitor is still on.
The only thing I can think of is maybe there is a modal dialog box or something that pops, leaving the computer waiting for input?
Just a quirk of the OS. Happened to me often till I re-installed the OS (98). Now it works all the time. I didn`t re-install just for that reason, there were other problems.
Windows gets all gumned up with background crap and stuff that never gets deleted. Untill, of course, you do a re-install.
There are other things you can do in the interim.
Kill all the startup programs you don`t need,
Delete temp files and cookies,
Run ad-aware (from lavasoft.com)
Defrag,
Add RAM
Disconnect the ethernet cable from your network card while away.
In addition to what whuckfistle suggests, I had a similar problem, and updating drivers (in my case the keyboard driver) may also help.