Can we have a demo control panel?

[Lexus Alyus]

Thats not a bad idea . Do you have the sound enabled?

Although, I never even see the point in screensavers. When they are on they usually come on in the middle of something (like I've just paused the game to go to the toilet, then the screensaver screws the game up... that was on windows 98 ), or it will just come up when I don't want it too... so I turn it off. If I'm gonna be away from my computer I just turn the monitor off... saves electricity and my monitors life span .

Note that when I said THE game that there was only one game I could have been talking about . Although, this was years ago, before source ports... or at least, before I knew about source ports . So, then I was running good ole vanilla Doom from windows 98... actually, to be more precise it would have most probably been TNT or Plutonia... I played doom and Doom2, but I played those more... cus they were newer to me... but you didn't really want to know that I'm sure... I'll shut up now .

[Mundungu]

Well Lexus... I obviously wouldn't have Doom running demos in the background while I was doing something else, like playing DooM... I just had a desktop shortcut to run it all, click it when I walk away from the PC. And yeah, I had the sound on. Something about the sounds of combat help me sleep at night.

[Risen]

http://www.doomworld.com/deskdoom

[HotWax]

Lexus: Instead of a screen saver, set your computer to turn off your monitor after 20 minutes of inactivity. It won't interrupt you in the middle of a game, unless you take a REALLY long time in the bathroom, and it actually turns off the montior for you without you putting wear and tear on the power switch.

My friend's mother used to bitch about her screen saver for the same reason. (It kept coming up while I'm ready my email, so I turned it off!) Do people just not realise you can specify how long it should wait?

Mundungu: The quickest way to put my daughter to sleep at night is to play a game of Quake 3. Go figure.

[Sticky]

My notebook--surprise--doesn't have a power button to wear out.

I use Steve Gibson's Wizmo program to turn off my monitor (and other stuff, too).
I'm sure there are many similar programs out there (and I think windows will even do most of it on its own...but I don't know how), but this one is surely the least intrusive.

[HotWax]

Right-click on the desktop, click properties, and go to the screen saver tab. Look at the bottom for an EnergyStar logo with a Power button on it. If it's not there, you're monitor doesn't support EnergyStar. If it is, click the Power button. Up will pop a handy window with three options, and possibly some other tabs (they might only show up on a laptop). The three options are:

Turn off monitor
Turn off hard disks
System Standby

I trust you can figure it out from here.

[Sticky]

(they might only show up on a laptop).

They show up on desktops, too. Unless that was a typo and you meant "not show up on a laptop".
In which case, yes, they do (at least on mine). It even lets you set two different sets of preferences for AC vs Battery power.

I totally agree with hotwax, anyone who hasn't been in there to customize those really should! Especially if you're paying your own energy bill!!! And/or if you have a heart for the environment... and, and and... etc.

And, like I said above, a little program like Wizmo to manually turn your screen off is way cool. That way it doesn't sit there for x number of mintues doing nothing after you've left the room... ya know? Wizmo has lots of other semi-useful features, too. [/plug]

[HotWax]

When I leave my computer at night, I set the configuration to "Quick off", which just has the "Turn off monitor" setting set to 1 minute. It would be handy to have a program to do it for me, but I'd have to weigh the cost in overhead of having a program I only use once a night running all day long, just to save myself a few clicks.

[Sticky]

I'd have to weigh the cost in overhead of having a program I only use once a night running all day long, just to save myself a few clicks.

Had you bothered to click the link , you'd have seen that the program is all of 38 k, and also that it does not need to be running all day. You could make a nice little icon on your desktop, or your quicklaunch, or put it in your system32 dir and run it from the command line right before bed. "windows+r wizmo monoff". Boom, cake. (where's cake mode btw? 'I would have bounced' on those jump levels)

I don't even think it needs to be running while the screen is off (rather hard for me to test this...as the screen is off) but tests with some of its other commands show that the process terminates itself as soon as it executes the command, and then is removed from memory. No overhead to worry about.