How to stop a laptop locking itself when left.
 

We have my wife's old work laptop here in France.

When left, it goes to sleep, then we have to press ctrl-alt-del to wake it up and it then demands a password, which we have.

That was all well and good when it was the main work computer, but it has now been superseded, and is now our backup out here.........(which is lucky, since the Acer desktop has conked).

It's running Vista.

Is there any way I can turn this feature off?

TIA

Yes you should be able to go in control panel and change the settings for the feature

Hi Jeff

Please click on the Control panel -> Power Options -> Edit power options and then click on the Change advanced power settings,where you can select this or not sure if this available in the Control panel home and there is section with Require a password on wakeup

Or this should help

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...a-04a551673a23


Jura

Went tp Power options, but it's the ONLY icon there which refuses to open.

You need to find where your screen saved settings are.
In here it will have something about locking the machine.

from the command prompt type powercfg.exe this should launch the power settings applet mentioned above unless it is corrupted or their are policy restrictions on your laptop denying access - the error message you receive will indicate whether is corrupt or access is revoked.

You could put the machine into presentation mode, bit of a PITA as it reverts on a reboot. type "present" into the search bar, you will be given an option to tick a box indicating you are presenting now. this stops the power saving settings taking effect.

an alternative route for a long term fix, and assuming you have admin rights on your logged in account;

from the command prompt type gpedit

locate the following entries Computer Configuration >> Administrative Templates >> System >> Power Management

Make the relevant changes

To force the change to take effect from the command prompt type gpupdate /force

(Hope I haven't missed anything here - I dont have a windows machine available to refer to the Group Policy editor.)

It doesn't find gpedit at all, finds gpupdate and then blanks it within a second, so I get a flash of black screen, with letters etc, but then it's gone.

Does the same with that powercfg.exe.

I reckon it's been locked by the original services that looked after it, we should have asked to have it UNlocked before bringing it.

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Provided the bios hasn't been password protected, i'd get rid of windows in favour of a fully functioning system.

If its an old work one it's probably been locked to stop settings being changed

That's what I think.

We WERE going to leave it here, but will probably now take it back one last time and ask the authority bod to remove the locking and need for a password.

Update: I've noticed this morning it runs Windows XP, not Vista. Didn't realise it was SO old.

Go to screen saver settings and untick the box 'On resume display logon screen'

I've tried that, I'll report back later when I can see what it's done.
Cheers.

And.........it works! :)

Thanks a lot, now I only need the password first time I boot up.

Your welcome... Glad I could help,