How to Disable the Screensaver

Welcome to Tekzilla Daily, I'm Patrick Norton. We’ve talked a lot about saving electricity when computing by making proper use of the power settings on your monitor, but this leads to some very annoying situations where in the middle of your favorite show like say tekzilla. And we’re about to showcase our website. We just can't get enough of it. Your monitor thinks, you're into idle, shuts off or you get a screensaver. It is annoying. What can you do?

Well, whether you’re running Windows or OS X, I’ve got a tool that makes it easy to temporarily disable the screensaver so you can watch a movies in peace. First up, caffeine for Windows, located at zeehornsoftware.co.uk/caffeine. It’s a simple coffee cup icon that stays in your system tray. When it’s active, the coffee cup is full and no screensaver will interrupt. When you're done watching those videos, just right click deselect active and the coffee cup will empty inserting all the energy saving benefits of your normal power settings.

For OS X user, there's another tool called guess what, caffeine, no relation. It works exactly the same way. Coffee cup in your menu bar, full mean it’s active, nothing shuts down. Empty means it’s inactive, your power saving features are back in place. So, you will never have to deal with pesky screensavers interrupting your precious podcast ever again.

Got a tip for us to pass along to the rest of TZ crew, give us a favor. Email us at tekzilla@revision3.com. And as always, tekzilla.com is the place to find more tips, tricks, product reviews and how-to’s.