Lately when I’m online, no matter what I’m doing, a window will pop up and say something like, “You’ve been inactive a while, do you want to remain online?” Now if that pops up while I’m in the bathroom, I get booted because I can’t say, yes I want to stay on. But the thing will even pop up while I’m typing or clicking links! I remember a few years ago, my family had something called “Kill Time” that prevented this, but when I did a search, I got an endless stream of hits for Kill Time that had nothing at all to do with this.
So my question is, are there any programs out there that will nix this little problem? Please help me!
When asking computer-related questions, it is often helpful to provide information such as OS, which ISP you use, type of connection (e.g. dialup, broadband), etc.
You could try downloading a large program. Your computer may consider that to be “activity” even if you aren’t actually doing anything. Of course, it will make anything else you try to do go slower. Or you could set up a macro that would access a web page every few minutes (although you’d have to make sure that it wasn’t simply going back to a cache).
Which program are you talking about? If its an Instant Messenger program or something similar, you can go into the preferences and change the idle timeout to something longer.
When I had dial-up, I had a little program that would run in the background and check my e-mail every few minutes. It would pop up to tell me I had new mail without having to keep my e-mail program open. Worked well for the ISP I was using at the time.
I just realized I’ve had Roadrunner for over 5 years.
I’m not sure if this is the source of your problem, but for a dial-up connection, there’s also an idle timeout setting you can access from IE.
Click on Tools. Select the “connections tab”. Click on your connection to hilite it. Click on the “settings” button. Near the bottom right of the window that pops up is an “advanced” button. Click on it and a window opens where you can set the idle timeout.
Either your ISP or your network connection has a settings that says “disconnect after X minutes of idle time”. Pinging will simulate activity and prevent the X minutes from being reached.
I think this helps ypu solve the problem.
Go to your dial up networking tab and click on the propeties of the dial up connection you are using.
In the options menu there is an option to select the time you want your connection to be inactive before hanging up(Idle time before hanging up). I guess by default this is 20 minutes. Change it to “never” and it shouldnt be a problem anymore.
If you are using win xp professional like me the process will be
Start>Settings>Network Connections>(your connection)>properties>options.
I remember a few years ago, my family had something called “Kill Time” that prevented this, but when I did a search, I got an endless stream of hits for Kill Time that had nothing at all to do with this.